AI Voice Platform Snips Raises $13 Million
Snips’ pre-built intents
Today, Snips announced it has raised $13 million for its AI voice platform. The company has now raised a total of $21 million for its platform that allows hardware makers to embed voice assistant services in just about any device. Unlike other voice assistant platforms, Snips operates entirely on a device. The company claims it is the “first ever voice platform to run fully on small devices such as Raspberry Pi” and offers full privacy and offline capabilities. Customers can build their own voice assistant with the Snips web console by using either pre-built or custom-built intents using five languages: English, French, Spanish, Germany and Korean. In addition to hardware makers, the company is also working on a consumer version that will let anyone adapt a version for use on a device powered by Raspberry Pi.
An Alternative to Google and Amazon
With voice assistants becoming more ubiquitous, Snips wanted to give hardware makers an alternative to Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. The platform gives customers complete control over their devices so companies can modify the voice designs. And because the platform does not run on a cloud, the software is not dependent on collecting data from users. Rand Hindi, Snips CEO, believes this could be a critical differentiator “next year when new European rules that require more explicit permission to collect user data go into effect.” Even without massive amounts of user data, Snips claims the accuracy of its natural language technology outperforms Facebook’s Wit.ai, Google’s API.ai, and Microsoft Luis.
The company believes “voice is the universal interface” and its mission seems to be making the use of voice platforms and assistants universal as well. “Voice is becoming more and more the most intuitive way to interact with machines,” said Hindi. To see a demo of the Snips Voice Platform, watch the video below.
