Creoir Oy, a leading provider of embedded speech technologies, announced today that it has closed a seed funding round joined by Butterfly Ventures, with later participation from other investors. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s international growth and to focus on sales and marketing efforts.
Creoir specializes in Voice User Interface (VUI) on-the-edge and its Offline Voice Solution (OVS) SDK enables fast and flexible embedded speech recognition and voice feedback for a wide range of segments including home appliances, industrial applications, medical devices, digital kiosks, self-service solutions, robots, mobile applications, and more. The solution supports 40 languages for speech recognition and 65 languages for voice feedback. In addition, the end-to-end solution guarantees the operation also in challenging noise environments.
“We are thrilled to have the support of Butterfly Ventures in our journey to bring our innovative and robust speech technologies to a global market,” said Antti Lilja, CEO and Co-Founder of Creoir. “This funding will enable us to speed up our go-to-market and to provide our customers with even more value.”
Ville Heikkinen, partner at Butterfly Ventures, added, “We are impressed by Creoir’s innovative technology and the team’s dedication to bringing Voice UI on-the-edge. We believe that the Creoir OVS SDK will have a significant impact on various industries, and we are excited to support the company in its growth journey.”
About Creoir
Creoir Oy is a Finnish technology company that specializes in embedded speech technologies. Creoir is committed to developing advanced speech technologies that improve the way people interact with machines and applications. Creoir has successfully delivered speech technology solutions for customers in different segments, such as building automation, enterprise applications, medical devices, home appliances, AR/VR smart glasses, industrial automation, and self-service solutions.
About Butterfly Ventures
Butterfly Ventures is the leading seed-stage VC in the Nordics. Butterfly Ventures is investing in the seed stage start-ups with a focus on software and hardware innovation. The firm’s portfolio includes companies in deep tech, HW, and HW interfacing SW.
During this year Creoir has participated in Kasvu Open acceleration and growth program. We are pleased to announce that Creoir was ranked among the TOP 10 most promising Finnish growth companies! The jury’s evaluation criteria included market potential, the team, growth strategy, and accomplishments.
“This is an important recognition that demonstrates that we have a great team with a strong vision and mission to help our clients bring embedded Voice UI to products and applications with great UX and performance!” says Antti Lilja, CEO of Creoir.
The journey continues until the final event in Jyväskylä on November 3rd. See more info about the event from the Kasvu Open event page.
Creoir has been exhibiting at Embedded World 2022, The embedded world Exhibition&Conference bring the entire embedded community together once a year in Nuremberg and provides a unique overview of the state-of-the-art in this versatile industry.
At our booth, we showed the latest demos around voice interaction:
Embedded ASR/NLU demo on NXP i.MX8M Nano
- Embedded ASR/NLU and TTS running on i.MX8mn hardware, using a 4-mic array
- Demo utilizes SSE to improve recognition result in a noisy environment
Embedded ASR/NLU in Synaptics VS640 SoC
- VS640 is a high-performance multimedia SoC for new-generation set-top-box and IoT devices with Far-Field voice support
- Demo includes ASR/NLU with a super directive fixed beam with a 2-mic array
Smart Home demo
- UI application that demonstrates Creoir OVS in a smart home use case
- On-the-edge NLU with context awareness and far-field capability
Multi-Language demo
- Application that demonstrates the flexibility of Creoir OVS when it comes to different languages and custom wake-word
We thank all the visitors for the interesting conversations and we look forward to implementing embedded speech technology in various application environments.
We are happy to announce that our main office has recently moved to a new location in Oulu, Finland. The new premises have been tailored to our operations so that our engineering team can serve our customers better. The main improvement is the new far-field audio lab which is now bigger, better, and more beautiful!
Far-Field Audio Lab
In Creoir’s far-field audio lab, our engineering team can implement multidisciplinary quality assurance and performance optimization of any voice-enabled product. Combining our audio/acoustics design expertise with Cerence Speech Signal Enhancement (SSE), we can guarantee the operation of custom voice assistants even in challenging noise conditions.
Naturally, our lab is also qualified by Amazon and supports the Amazon Qualification Tool (AQT). We are able to offer Alexa Voice Services (AVS) pre-certification testing, Alexa product validation and optimization, and systems integration of built-in Alexa products.
Professional Audio/Voice Engineering Services
Creoir professional engineering services for audio/voice products include:
- End-to-end audio & acoustics design
- Microphone and speaker performance optimization
- Systems integration for embedded audio devices
- Far-field voice processing integration using dedicated front-end DSP or Cerence Speech Signal Enhancement
- Anechoic chamber measurements and far-field voice verification
Our new address is:Elektroniikkatie 6
FIN-90590 Oulu
Creoir has been supporting brands and manufacturers to bring voice interfaces to various products ranging from smart speakers and set-top boxes to home appliances since 2016, now we are distributing Cerence AI Speech Technologies. Voice UI is now moving to all industries, as it enables convenience and speed of use and can improve operational efficiency for example in industrial automation. Due to this, there is a growing need for custom voice assistants and secure, embedded voice control.
“We are proud to announce that Creoir has been nominated as an official reseller of Cerence Inc.’s speech technologies.” Says Creoir CEO Antti Lilja.
Industry leader from the automotive industry
“Cerence AI is the industry leader in AI-powered voice technologies in the mobility space, with their technology shipped in more than 350 million cars. Creoir Offline Solution has been built on top of Cerence AI automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS). Thus, the Creoir engineering team has profound hands-on experience with the technology.” Lilja continues.
Ensuring end-to-end voice and audio performance
Another critical part of Creoir’s offering is to ensure end-to-end voice and audio performance. Now, Creoir can also offer Cerence AI speech signal enhancement (SSE), a suite of sound processing technologies that remove noise from microphone inputs and offer the far-field capability to products used even in noisy environments. SSE is critical to the voice experience, enabling users to effectively use wake-up words and seamlessly interrupt and interact with the assistant. SSE is tightly integrated with ASR and runs fully embedded in a host processor, which means that there is no need for additional HW DSP chips to realize far-field voice pick-up.
Creoir Offline Voice Solution – All-in-One Speech Technologies
Creoir licenses the Software Development Kits (SDK) to clients who can effortlessly create custom Voice UI to enable Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and human-like voice output. Contact us for more information about the licensing models and professional engineering support.
You can learn more about Creoir Offline Voice Solution and Cerence AI CSDK here. Feel free to contact us to arrange a meeting with our team and get guidance on how to add voice to your products.
About Cerence AI:
Cerence AI (NASDAQ: CRNC) is the global industry leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the mobility world. As an innovation partner to the world’s leading automakers and mobility OEMs, it is helping advance the future of connected mobility through intuitive, powerful interaction between humans and their cars, two-wheelers, and even elevators, connecting consumers’ digital lives to their daily journeys no matter where they are. Cerence AI’s track record is built on more than 20 years of knowledge and more than 350 million cars shipped with Cerence AI technology. Whether it’s connected cars, autonomous driving, e-vehicles, or buildings, Cerence AI is mapping the road ahead.
For more information, visit www.cerence.com.
Creoir has been selected as an NXP Registered Partner.
The NXP partner program comprises a global network of independent engineering companies that offer vital tools, software, technology, engineering services, and training to speed clients’ design.
NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) is the world leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications, NXP is pushing boundaries in the automotive, industrial & IoT, mobile, and communication infrastructure markets.
“Creoir has worked many years with products and services that have successfully enabled NPX products to use. The selection as NXP Partner is proof of the high-level competence of our staff on NXP products and applications.” says the company’s CEO Antti Lilja.
“We are excited to continue working closely with NXP and our mutual clients to create innovative products to market with great voice experiences!” Lilja continues
From here you can read the Creoir NXP partner profile information.