Snips, an Edge-based voice platform for connected devices founded by Mael Primet, Michael Fester, and Rand Hindi in 2013. The startup is an end-to-end solution with Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding, enabling anyone to add a customizable voice assistant to their product. The startup is an artificial intelligence voice platform that runs on the edge, without sending any voice data to the cloud. It is the only deep-learning based voice platform that runs fully on-device while maintaining Cloud-like performances. It can run without the need for a server or the cloud. It only requires a little hardware and can run on both microcontrollers and microprocessors.

Snips leverage the ability to create custom voice commands and natural language interfaces to lead the embedded voice revolution. Till now, over 23,000 developers have joined the Snips community to build their own voice assistant. The startup offers Privacy by Design, making it the only solution guaranteed to be legal under the new European Privacy regulation (GDPR). There is no additional cost other than it’s just a onetime fee, the voice assistant a component like any other. The startup embedded voice AI technology that offers enterprises and developers offline and private-by-design conversational interfaces to animate interactions with products.

Snips’ Funding and Investment:

To date, Snips has a total of 5 rounds of funding of €21.94 million from 8 investors. Jun 1, 2018, was its latest funding from a Grant round:

Date	Round	No. Of Investors	Amount	Investors
Jun 1, 2018	Grant	–	€1.51 Million	–
Jun 14, 2017	Series A	4	€11.55 Million	Korelya Capital, MAIF Avenir
Jun 1, 2017	Grant	–	€1.51 Million	–
Sep 1, 2016	Grant	–	€1.78 Million	–
Jun 26, 2015	Seed Round	6	€5.6 Million	The Hive

Investors:

• MAIF Avenir
• Korelya Capital
• Bpifrance
• 500 Startups
• Eniac Ventures
• The Hive
• Xavier Niel
• Brent Hoberman

Snips: An Answer to the Issue of Privacy Concern:

In 2018, popular voice assistants like Alexa, Cortona and Siri were on headlines and was continuously facing issues, when news came out that the users’ private data is compromised, or even sent to random people. Last year May the news was authenticated when Amazon confirmed that their Echo devices weren’t always recording, but it did confirm the audio of a private conversation recorded on the device and later was sent to a random contact. Snips is claiming that it might have an answer to the issue of security and data privacy. It has built its software that can run independently from the cloud 100% on-device, where user data is processed on the device itself so there is no possibility of the data leak.

A recent partnership between Snips and DSP Group, Inc. may bring multi-room embedded voice recognition architecture for smart building verticals and smart home. The partnership between the European pioneer in embedded voice recognition software for businesses, products and services, Snips and a leading global provider of integrative wireless chipset solutions for converging communications, DSP Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: DSPG) announced that their technology partnership will combine Snips’ voice software with DSP Group’s Ultra Low Energy (ULE) system-on-chip (SoC) and modules. This combination of software and hardware operating over the ULE network is expected to extend the reach of natural voice-controlled edge devices.

“Snips and DSP Group share a vision for the future of embedded voice recognition across multiple verticals.  Edge technologies play an important role in the adoption of voice recognition technologies increase. By combining our voice recognition software, running on-device and offline, together we give OEMs a new possibility to create a local grid of mutually-aware devices, lowering the BoM per device and giving opportunities to diversify their product offerings,” said Yann Lechelle, Chief Operations Officer at Snips.

Snip’s Accomplishment:

Snips’ unique technology helps in running the voice assistants directly inside devices instead of gathering data to the cloud. This feature of Snips enables the startup to offer Privacy by Design, in stiff opposition with other voice assistants like Cortona, Siri and Alexa. It is much better from other cloud-based voice assistants on the basis of use cases such as home automation, playing music or getting recommendations. The existing business of the startup is to sell its AI-based technology to the device manufacturers, charging a license fee per device. And this shows that Snips don’t require monetizing the user data or the applications developers create, aligning their growth with the community.

Snips major competitors are Alexa, Cortona, Siri, Wit.ai, MindMeld and Viv. Despite the stiff competition, it has uniquely positioned itself in a way that offers users the benefits of voice assistance that many already enjoy without the dread associated with it. There’s a startup name Aiqudo, which is trying to build the actual algorithms for voice recognition as well as an interface. Aiqudo is working beyond the traditional neural networks; it is building up libraries based on semantic understanding.

“We realised a few years back that the way we interact with technology simply won’t work with hundreds of billions of devices. The constant interruptions, the need to learn how to use every device, the lack of personalisation. All of those compounds to a point where we might become slaves to our technology! What we believe is – that by putting an AI in every device, while protecting privacy – we will be able to remove the friction of using technology, eventually automating most interactions so that we, as humans, never have to handle technology ourselves,” says Dr Rand Hindi, co-founder and CEO at Snips.

Future Potential of Snips:

Worldwide, there are a plethora of startups working with various different technologies in strange and innovative ways. Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting fields and the area where most of the technological research happening today. Snips is also one of them and it aims to make life much simpler with the addition of a personal and private AI. It entirely operated on a device and do not connect to a cloud platform. Unlike Google and Amazon, Snips do not collect a massive amount of data and do not depend on the user’s data collection. In this constantly evolving world of the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Hardware, Voice Assistants and Artificial Intelligence (AI), privacy focus is lost somewhere.

Several issues of lack of privacy are on the headlines nowadays. Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa; the most popular voice assistants offering increased benefits to consumers, such as smart home connectivity and easy hands-free access but what about the lack of privacy, which is a major drawback. But the voice assistant from Snips is different from Alexa and Siri and do not collect data on the cloud. Snips build equivalent or better than a cloud-based voice assistant, after working for 2 years. With the rapidly evolving technology, it is the future of the world that will link everything together.

“Our goal is that every single device, from smartphones to cars, TVs or home appliances, contains our technology. We want those devices to disappear into the background so that we don’t have to think about them anymore,” said Dr Rand Hindi.

Pic Credit: The Mozilla Blog

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Tags: Aiqudo, Alexa, amazon, Artificial Intelligence, Cortona, Craft Driven, DSP Group, Europe Market Research, European Startups, GDPR, Inc., Internet of Things (IoT), Mael Primet, market research, Michael Fester, MindMeld, Natural Language Understanding, Rand Hindi, Siri, Smart Hardware, Snips, Speech Recognition, startups, Viv, Voice Assistants, Wit.ai