In-Q-Tel backs speech recognition outfit

In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s venture capital arm, has made an investment in an automatic speech recognition startup to determine how that technology can be of use for government agencies.

Terms of IQT’s investment in Deepgram were undisclosed, but Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson wrote in a blog post Thursday that the partnership grants agencies access to the company’s platform that incorporates deep learning functions.

Scott Stephenson wrote that the pact with IQT is the latest effort by the company in “expanding our relationship with the organization and its government partners.”

“Deepgram’s use of an AI enabled, neural network architecture leveraging custom speech recognition models trained on vast amounts of audio data allows them to rapidly achieve much more accurate transcriptions for non-standard audio environments vs solutions like Google Voice and Apple Siri,” IQT’s managing partner for investments George Hoyem said in an accompanying release.

“Using state of the art transfer learning also enables Deepgram to quickly build speech to text capabilities for new and novel language variants on relatively small amounts of training data, resulting in huge time savings for our government partners.”