Technology

Kadho, a company building automatic speech recognition technology to help children communicate with voice-powered devices, is officially exiting stealth today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 where itlaunching its new technology, Kidsense Edge voice A.I.The company claims its technology can better decode kids& speech as it was built using speech data from 150,000 childrenvoices. The COPPA-compliant solution, which is initially targeting the voice-enabled devices and voice-enabled toys market, is already being used by paying customers.

As anyone with an Echo smart speaker or Google Home can tell you, todaydevices often struggle to understand childrenvoices. Thatbecause current automatic speech recognition technology has been built for adults and was trained on adult voice data.

Kidsense.ai, meanwhile, was built for kids using voices of children from different age groups and speaking different languages. By doing so, it believes it can outperform the big players in the market like Google, Samsung, Baidu, Amazon, and Microsoft, when it comes to understanding childrenspeech, the company says.

The company behind the Kidsense AI technology, Kadho, has been around since 2014, and was originally founded by PhDs with backgrounds in A.I. and neuroscience,Kaveh Azartash (CEO) and Dhonam Pemba (Chief Scientist). Chief Revenue Officer, Jock Thompson, is a third co-founder today.

Initially, the companyfocus was on building conversational-based language learning applications for kids.

&But the biggest pain point that we encountered…was that the devices that we were using or apps on & either mobile phones, tablets, robotics, or smart speakers & they&re not built to understand kids,& explains Azartash. He means the speech recognition technology wasn&t built on kids& data. &They&re not designed to communicate or understand kids.&

The team realized there was a bigger problem to solve. Teaching kids new language using conversational techniques couldn&t work until devices could actually understand the kids. The company shifted to focus instead on speech recognition technology, using a data set of kids voices (which it did with parents& consent, we&re told), to build Kidsense.

The initial product was a server-based solution called Kidsense cloud AI in late 2017. But more recently, itbeen working on an embedded version of the same platform, where no audio data from kids is collected, and no data is sent to cloud-based servers. This allows the solution to be both COPPA and GDPR-compliant.

This also means it could address the needs of device makers who have been previously come under fire for their less than secure toys and robotics, like MattelHello Barbie, or its canceled A.I. speaker Aristotle.The idea today is that toy makers, smart speaker manufacturers, and others catering to the kids& market will need to be compliant with more stringent privacy laws and, to do so, the processing has to be done on the device, not the cloud.

&All the decoding, all the processing is one on the device,& saysAzartash. &So we&re able to offer better efficacy and better accuracy in converting speech to text…the technology does not send any speech data to the server.&

&We&ve figured out how to put this all onto the device in an efficient way using minimal processing power,& adds Thompson. &And because we&re embedded we can charge a flat fee depending on the product anywhere to a subscription model.&

For example, a toy company working with thin margins on a product with a really small lifespan might want a flat fee. But another company may have a product with a longer lifespan that they charge their own customers for on subscription. They may want to be able to update their productvoice tech capabilities over-the-air. Thatalso possible here.

The company says its technology is in several toys, robotics, and A.I. speaker products around the world, but some of its customers are under NDA.

Italso testing its technology with chip makers and big-name kids& brands here in the U.S.

On stage, the company also showed off its latest development & dual language speech recognition technology. This is the first technology that can decode two languages in one sentence, when spoken by kids. This is an area smart speakers and their related voice technology are only now entering, within the adult market that is. For example, Google Assistant is preparing to become multilingual inEnglish, French and German this year.

Currently, the company has approximately $1.2 million in revenue from customers on annual contracts and its SaaS model. Itbeen operating in stealth mode, but is now preparing to reach more customers.

To date, Kadho has raised$2.5 million from investors includingPlug and Play Tech Center, Beam Capital, Skywood Capital, SFK Investment, Sparks Lab, and other angel investors. Itpreparing to raise an additional $3 million before moving to a Series A.

For Lori Systems chief executive and co-founder Josh Sandler, deals like the one between his company and the Kenyan government to solve last-mile solutions around the national railroad are about far more than just logistics.

Sandler, whose family battled apartheid in South Africa as social workers, township doctors and (more dangerously) as financiers for the Spear of the Nation (the armed wing of the African National Congress), looks at logistics as an economic cornerstone for building more stable and democratic societies in sub-Saharan Africa.

His parents had immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 when Sandler was still a young child to escape the violence that accompanied the negotiations to dissolve South Africaapartheid state. Sandlerfather had worked as a doctor in township hospitals, while his mother was a social worker who was setting up a support network for abused children.

&A lot of the family was getting arrested and the country was breaking up and people feared a civil war and my dad got a fellowship in America and moved to Florida,& Sandler says.

But South Africa remained the touchstone for Sandlerfamily life and he would often return to visit those activist relatives who remained to help shepherd the country through its early years as a democracy. It was during one visit to the country — when Sandler was working in a refugee camp — that the need for better economic solutions to the regionproblems became clear.

In the aftermath of the economic collapse of Zimbabwe and the long-simmering civil war in the Congo in 2008, refugees from the region were flooding into South Africa — and it triggered a response in the countrycitizens. Xenophobic violence resulted in rioting, looting and the murder of immigrants at camps — and Sandler had gone to volunteer at the shelters that were caring for these refugees.

&I had been debating between investment banking and the peace corps and went with investment banking because there needs to be a macroeconomic solution for this,& Sandler said. &Finding the core challenges from a macro perspective and preventing this from occurring by establishing strong systems and an economy that can prevent… all of these crises.&

So Sandler studied development economics. His work focused on supply chains — specifically working with the Kenyan government to analyze what went into the dramatic cost increases that are attendant with the sale of every good and service in the country. &When you buy a mango on a farm, ithalf a penny and then in the supermarket it80 cents,& said Sandler.

From Kenya, Sandler moved to study Nigeria and worked on problems with supply chain management in pharmaceuticals. &I did a lot of trips and treks back to the continent and what I kept seeing is challenges in the supply chain — part of it is middlemen and part of it is haulage.& Sandler said. &Thata big issue thatdue to a lack of flexibility and coordination in the system.&

After seeing the elegance of the marketplace model that Uber had set up for ride-hailing and given the penetration of smart and feature phones in Africa, Sandler thought he could do something to create a marketplace for the trucking industry.

&Before, providers were managing individual trucking companies with a difficult marketplace and no transparency,& says Sandler. &By driving that through our system and having more pricing visibility we&re able to bring down the cost of bringing bulk grains to Uganda by 17.3 percent.&

Lori Systems first launched in Kenya and started working with a network of trucking companies. Around that time the company also came to the attention of TechCrunch.

Yes, Lori Systems has been on a TechCrunch stage before — as competitors (and eventual winners) of our inaugural TechCrunch Battlefield competition in Nairobi.

Since appearing on stage at our Nairobi event, Lori has grown quickly. The company counts 70 employees on staff — up from 20 — and now has 70 cargo operators responsible for a network of 2,500 trucks using its service.

The staffing changes at Lori include some big new executive hires, including Andrew Musoke, who has come on board as director of commercial products, and a former director of Maersk, Mehul Bhaat, who will be running operations in East Africa for Lori, Sandler says.

Lori has also expanded internationally — working with fleets in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa while also increasing the types of cargo that its fleet operators are transporting. &We went from just doing grain and fertilizer to now we do all freight bulk,& says Sandler.

Not everything about the TechCrunch experience was positive for Sandler and the company. After their victory, Lori, and Sandler, were subjected to criticism from some African press. &There were really bizarre implications with the underlying tone being white male privilege,& says Sandler. &Itan important conversation to have around white male privilege… [but] it was coming out on a very personal level on a gossip column.&

The accusations aside, Sandler said the victory in the Startup Battlefield Africa competition validated the company with potential new hires.

As for the opportunity, Sandler says there$180 billion in hauling income across the African continent, and very little of it has been optimized with software. Ultimately, if Lori succeeds it will mean lower prices and increased spending power for consumers across Africa.

&If you&re earning a dollar a day and 40 percent or 60 percent is going to logistics that could be going somewhere else, thata problem,& Sandler said. Itexactly the problem that Lori is setting out to solve.