2022 was a peculiar year for the voice AI industry, with ups and downs. While reviewing Picovoice’s 2022, we gathered updates from the other players in the industry.
January
Sensory, known for its wake words, launched Sensory CloudAI. With that, Sensory expanded its portfolio by adding cloud-based speech-to-text powered by NVIDIA’s open-source NeMo toolkit.
February
Cerence, enabling more than fifty percent of the cars globally, lost one-third of its value right after its earning call in February due to ongoing supply issues in the automotive industry and changes in its C-level management.
March
Microsoft completed the $19.7B acquisition of Nuance, owner of Dragon Speech Recognition, and announced its goals to bring Nuance’s conversational AI with Microsoft’s secure and trusted industry cloud offerings.
April
One of the few independent voice AI vendors, Soundhound, also known for its music discovery app, went public for $2.1B on Nasdaq following a SPAC merger.
May
After the last update on its repositories in April, another independent voice AI vendor Spokestack archived its GitHub repositories and became silent. Its open-source repositories are still available for developers.
June
Google decided to sunset Google Assistant applications by encouraging developers to build for Android.
August
Google decided to add a few more lawsuits to its ongoing patent battle with Sonos.
September
OpenAI, the owner of the famous image generator DALL-E, announced open-source Whisper Speech-to-Text that processes voice data on-device.
October
Google announced Google Cloud On-Device a few weeks ago. Right now, we only know the model size is couple hundred megabytes, and Toyota is the first customer.
November
November was a tough month for the industry. After Rev in October and Soundhound in early November, Amazon also announced layoffs impacting Alexa. There is no further information shared on the affected teams. However, given META and Twitter laid off their entire research and ethical AI teams, buyers should review the privacy practices of voice vendors thoroughly.
