Episode description

In this episode, you'll hear me talk with six of the hottest startups at the Slush 2019 tech conference in Helsinki, Finland. These include: a mobile app and Alexa skill to track your carbon footprint from your purchases; an automatic podcast creation product that uses text to speech to transform your blog posts into full podcast episodes; a wonderful UK startup that helps children to say what's on their minds and report abuse; an ID verification system that makes you pull funny faces to authenticate; a multimodal human emotion detection system from Russia that measures speech, gesture, heart rate and breathing to outperform some of the big tech players; and a super cool tactile sensor that lets you communicate with your autonomous car by touching it in different ways. 

It was an amazing event, and the Finns are justifiably proud of Slush, with over 25,000 attendees from around the world, and easily taking the title for best looking tech conference. It was surprising how few voice startups there were at the event, until I realised that both Alexa and Google Assistant do not support the Finnish language. And while they all speak perfect english, their accent can cause problems with the speech recognition. 

Quotes from the show

[10:05] Whatever obstacles you have in life, you should have access the same education 

[15:25] We can detect whether or not it's a human hand, to avoid cheating 

[29:00] The little girl would never have reported the abuse to the police otherwise 

Links from the show

• Manning books: https://www.manning.com << 40% off all books code: PODVOICETECH19 
• VoiceTech Paris 2019 tickets: http://bit.ly/35Mo3tv << 20% off code: VT19-VTECHPOD 
• Take the voice-based survey: "Alexa/Google, launch Voice Tech Survey" 
• Slush http://slush.org/
• Enfuce carbon tracking Alexa skill https://enfuce.com/
• Tacterion tactile sensors https://www.tacterion.com/
• Neurodata Lab emotion tracking https://neurodatalab.com/
• Mind of my Own children's app https://mindofmyown.org.uk/
• Get ID verification https://getid.ee/
• iSoft automatic podcast creation https://isoft.ai/
• Peakon https://peakon.com/
• Peakon Presentation on YouTube https://youtu.be/CSiZnqFTW14?t=4447

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