Google and Lenovo have teamed up to create a turnkey hardware-software solution, built exclusively around Google Meet. The video conferencing solution is comprised of five hardware components, leverages Google's TPU capabilities, and uses Google Assistant to optimize the video conferencing experience.

Insights:

- As remote work grows in popularity, tech companies are looking to replicate and enhance traditional work through software and hardware solutions that are built for remote settings.

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Observe.AI is a startup that uses AI, Speech Recognition, and Natural Language Processing to power call center software. They recently announced a $54M Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Next47 Ventures and NGP Capital.

Insights:

- Observe was started in 2017 and now has 105 employees, large customers, and accelerated growth due to COVID-19.

- Overview of how they use conversational ai to improve call centers.

- A look ahead at how they will be allocating the capital from their Series B fundraise and the focus of their Faster, More Accurate and More Human mantra for product development.

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Dieter Bohn, the executive editor at the tech publication the Verge, published an article yesterday praising the Apple Watch’s utility, while highlighting the smart watch's biggest limitation: Siri.  Apple's path toward creating more utility for Siri on the Watch might ultimately lie in using Siri to more accurately catalog the data being logged by the Watch.

Insights:

- Siri has a lot of untapped potential as it relates to working with the Apple Watch

- Too many mistakes with basic functionality

- Bright spot might be for users to more accurately catalog their activity and health data via quick Siri inputs

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Replicant is an autonomous contact center that creates an always on customer experience with Voice AI. They just raised a $27M Series A led by Norwest Venture partners with participation from State Farm's venture arm, Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, and Costanoa Ventures.

Insights:

- Quick history on how Replicant was incubated out of Atomic, one of the Replicant investors

- Overview of the product experience between conversing with the AI or being handed off to a human

- Look into where the fundraising capital will be put to work

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At the Conference for Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging 2020 Nvidia researchers presented a paper giving insight into how a medically savvy language model can be applied to improve physician productivity and patient experiences.

Insights: 

- How advances in NLP have lead to architectures such as BERT

- The Nvidia hypothesis for biomedical data vs a general dataset in sophisticated language models

- Results of the research

- Why research started amidst COVID-19 pandemic

- Overview of the value proposition that improves physician productivity

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Chartable, a startup that creates Podcast analytics & attribution for publishers and advertisers, just raised $2.25 million in seed funding. The funding was led by Initialized Capital,  which also contributed to Chartable’s $1.5 million round last year and includes participation from Naval Ravikant, Greycroft Partners, The Fund, and Weekend Fund.

Insights:

- Background of the Founders of Chartable, Dave Zohrob and Harish Agarwal, and how their frustrations running their own podcast, Hacker News, led to Chartable.

- Quick overview of their Podcast Analytics and Attribution products for publishers and advertisers including Smart Ads, Smart Links, and Smart Promos.

- Data on how much traffic the Chartable platform is handling in 2020

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To engage with popular voice assistants like Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant you need to call it by name. Cerence is switching this up for voice tech in the car by releasing its customizable wake-up word technology that enables drivers to create their own personalized wake-up word for their automotive assistant.

Insights:

- How the customizable wakeword technology works

- First roll out of custom wakeword technology in BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant

- How this feature ties into the "My Car, My Voice" experience released in 2019

- Motivation for why Cerence is creating these types of products

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This is a voiceover of the Sonic Insights Newsletter - which covers news in the emerging space of audio, voice and hearable tech.

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Trint’s speech-to-text platform makes any audio and video searchable, editable and shareable. They just raised a Series A Acceleration Round, with The New York Times Company as the lead investor.

Insights:

- Background & Experience

- Looking Ahead

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Curio is an audio platform that handpicks content from leading publications and turns it into narrated audio you can listen to at any time. Their $9M Series A investment round is led by Earlybird, with participation from Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures and Horizons Ventures.

Insights:

- Background & Experience

- Looking Ahead

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