The SPEAKER project for the development of a voice assistant platform “made in Germany” won an award at the “Artificial intelligence as a driver for economically relevant ecosystems” innovation competition run by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. This Fraunhofer project was one of 16 outstanding concepts that prevailed in a field of more than 130 submissions. The award ceremony took place on September 19, 2019, as part of the inauguration of the Digital Technology Forum in Berlin.
Demand for voice assistant technology in German industry and the German economy is enormous. So far, however, it has not been possible to implement European standards of data security with solutions from overseas. The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS have teamed up to develop a leading voice assistant platform “made in Germany” for business-to-business applications, which makes it possible to ensure the data sovereignty of personal and company-relevant information. The idea is that companies will be able to use single modules of the technology and adapt them to their needs.
The planned SPEAKER platform is embedded in a comprehensive ecosystem consisting of large-scale industry, mid-sized companies, startups and research partners who ensure high innovative capability and the transfer from research into practice. Numerous big-name partners from industry and research joined the SPEAKER project already during the concept phase. For the planned implementation, further interested companies can join the consortium and bring their requirements to the project.
The collaboration between Fraunhofer IIS and Fraunhofer IAIS brings together experts from the fields of speech signal processing, natural language understanding, artificial intelligence and software engineering. Fraunhofer IIS already holds a world-leading position in the field of acoustic signal processing technology, which forms the basis for the high reliability and robustness of speech processing. Fraunhofer IAIS is one of the leading research institutes in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and offers robust, tried-and-tested solutions in the field of automatic speech recognition (audio mining) and automatic question answering, which are successfully in use at many companies and institutions.
Source: “Fraunhofer SPEAKER project rewarded at AI innovation competition held by German government”, Fraunhofer Institute of Integrated Circuits IIS
