Capita Scaling Partner contender: Vocavio

Vocavio was one of just six UK tech scaleups shortlisted for the recent Capita Scaling Partner event held in association with the TechMarketView Innovation Partner Programme. Contenders are vying for the opportunity for a transformative partnership with UK business systems leader Capita.

TMV had the pleasure to meet Conor McKenna, CEO and co-founder of the company, at Capita offices in London.

Vocavio provides voice analytics software to developers and integrators of simulation, training and operations systems. The specific market need addressed in the early stages of the company's development is in highly-regulated safety and mission-critical environments, where operators are legally required to assess their people for non-technical competencies like communication and teamwork. This applies, for example, to pilots, soldiers and nuclear operators.

Traditional methods of communication skills assessment and monitoring are subjective, labour-intensive and therefore costly. Vocavio's software solution can efficiently grade a user's communication and coordination skills via tonal analysis of the human voice. It relies on an assessment of "prosodic accommodation", the signals embedded in the tone of speech of a user which give vital clues to the user's understanding of and buy-in to the discussion.

Vocavio's software uses "narrow" artificial intelligence (AI), where a model is making repeatable calculations of identified features. It doesn't require training data to set up and can ingest dialogue of any language to quickly calculate a communication performance by computing a correlation coefficient of various speech tones. The software provides consistent, non-subjective ratings to support instructors running a training exercise, or advanced monitoring systems engineered to monitor risk and human performance.

It is patented in several markets and available via the cloud or on-premise on a subscription model. It offers significant benefits over basic transcription technologies, which simply transcribe the words spoken but offer no assessment of the quality of communication or cognitive state of the speakers.

Whilst the company's initial target market is developers of advanced systems in aerospace and defence, there is potential benefit in any market sector in which the quality of communications is critical to efficiency and outcome delivery, for example airports and surgical operating theatres. The company has several contracts already and is actively seeking expansion opportunities. Given the deeptech nature of its technology, it has significant value to offer and we will watch its progress with interest.

Posted by Tania Wilson at '09:00' - Tagged: analytics   AI   voice   machinelearning