Patricia Scanlon


Patricia Scanlon is an Irish entrepreneur. She founded SoapBox Labs in 2013, a company that applies artificial intelligence to develop voice and speech recognition applications that are specifically tuned to children's voices. It builds language learning appliances for education like text reading and speech therapy, and modules for toys, gaming, voice control, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, and the Internet of things. As of 2015 she is CEO of SoapBox Labs, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The startup raised $3.6 million.

Education

Scanlon holds a PhD in digital signal processing and electronic engineering. She executed research for Columbia university, IBM, University College Dublin, and Nokia Bell Lab in Dublin.

SoapBox Labs Voice Technology for Kids

The off-the-shelf voice technology found in devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home are built primarily for adults, using adult voice data. Kids have higher pitched voices and unpredictable speech patterns. Unlike adults, kids also won't adapt their speech to ensure they are understood by voice-controlled user interfaces and smart assistants. Voice technology based on adult voice data models performs poorly when used by kids, and the younger the kid, the poorer the performance.

SoapBox Labs uses deep neural network-based speech recognition technology to analyze children's speech in real-world noisy environments

Awards

Soapbox Labs was awarded a 1,5 million euro grant by EU SME in 2017.
In October 2018, Scanlon was listed by Forbes as one of the top 50 Women in Tech in Europe and one of the top 50 Women in Tech worldwide

Public Speaking

Scanlon has spoken at conferences such as Inspirefest.