Earlier this year, SoapBox Labs – developer of safe, secure and accurate speech recognition technology for children – welcomed Jamie Beaumont as its new Chief Operations Officer.

In the role, Beaumont leads operations, scaling and strategic partnerships. We spoke with him to find out more about the opportunities around voice tech for toy companies and brand owners.

Jamie, thanks for talking to me today. Prior to joining SoapBox, you were MD at LEGO Ventures. How did you start working in the toy space?
The first half of my career was in the financial services industry. I was an accountant, and then I was an investment banker. In 2010, I left London to become a CFO and spent the next 10 years as a CFO/COO at a number of different companies, including Kano Computing, who make DIY computer kits that teach kids how to code.

By the time I got to LEGO I had sat at various sides of the table. I’d advised and operated; but I’d never sat on the investment side. LEGO Ventures was an opportunity to take the exposure I’d had to the kids’ space with Kano and translate that into an investment environment with an incredible brand that wanted to do something really impactful.

My biggest passion is around building and growing impactful businesses, and that led me to where I am now as COO at SoapBox Labs.
 
So what attracted you to SoapBox?
I had tracked SoapBox for a few years while at LEGO Ventures, following their progress and technology.

I saw a clear and obvious gap in the market between the capabilities of big tech when it comes to speech recognition for adults versus speech recognition for kids.

When you dig into how speech tech can be used – whether in education or in play – it’s game-changing. Voice is a new paradigm in how people interact with technology, eliminating the need to type, swipe, or click on devices.

Kids’ ability to speak develops much more rapidly than their ability to type. With speech recognition, you can give kids access to amazing, joyful experiences that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

On the education side of things, do you think speech tech has the potential to transform how kids learn at school?
Voice-enabled learning tools in the classroom are game changing. Here’s a simple example. When you and I were at school, a teacher would ask a kid to read in class and 20 other kids would listen. The kid gets a minute of reading practice, and everyone else listens passively.

Voice-enabled reading tools flip that around, so that every kid gets to practice reading aloud, and a teacher gets data around every student’s reading progress that spans the fluency, the accuracy, the pronunciation, and the comprehension of every kid in the class. Once you have that, you can start to personalise and progress the way kids read and advance.

The area of education where there’s currently a huge amount of data is math, because it’s right or wrong, and there’s little interpretation needed. Speech tech has now reached a stage where we can form a data set around language, and that data set can be used in really meaningful ways to help kids progress.

“Game changing” is the right phrase; it sounds incredibly exciting. Moving back to toys, what are the opportunities with speech tech for toy and game companies?
In the toy space, it’s all about making the relationship between the brand and the child more magical and engaging.

With voice-enabled physical toys, there’s the experience of playing with toys with your hands, while also controlling elements of that experience with your voice. There’s the pure amazement and joy kids get when they talk to a machine and the machine understands them and responds in the right way. It gives kids a whole new element of control; suddenly they can have a two-way relationship with their toys.

If toy companies can create conversational experiences, be it through toys or digital apps and games, it makes for a deeper, richer, and more engaging experience that’s accessible for kids of any age.

And I imagine the same opportunities exist for brand owners outside of toys; both those with characters, as well as brands like museums or food and drink IP.
Absolutely. What brands are always trying to do is to develop a connection with the consumer and then increase the depth of that engagement and frequency of touchpoints. If you can make an experience interactive and personalised by voice-enabling it, you begin to develop deeper relationships with customers.

Looking further ahead, do you see a point where kids can engage with TV shows with voice, where a character in a show might stop to engage – via voice – with the viewer?
SoapBox is already working on proofs of concepts with clients to do just that. The idea of conversational TV is very much in the near future.

Going beyond that, imagine an episode of a show like Sesame Street that isn’t just about the letter G, but actively asks kids to say words beginning with G, and the show doesn’t continue until the child responds with an appropriate answer. So that kind of viewing experience becomes more fun, more educational, and more meaningful. It also gives the child control and agency – and lets them talk to Big Bird!

You can apply that to any IP under the sun.

It sounds exciting. So for anyone intrigued by all this, how does SoapBox work with toy firms and brand owners on these kinds of projects?
We’re a deep-tech company, so the first thing we do when working with brands is to partner very closely with them to help translate our speech tech into their product. We want to define an idea and turn it into a reality.

Or if a company is just interested in how it can use voice, we’ll start off by doing a creative review with that company and the brands or products it’s considering voice-enabling. We run workshops to educate product teams, engineers and designers on speech tech and what’s achievable with it, and help them articulate the easy to more complex use cases for it across their range of products.

Brill – and we should point people to https://www.soapboxlabs.com to find out more. One more question before I let you go: More generally, do you think the opportunities around speech tech are ripe for any sort of brand? Or is this primarily suitable for film, TV, and character brands?
It’s worth emphasising that at SoapBox we focus on the kids’ space. That said, this is all about whether companies want to create fun and easy ways for consumers to engage with their brands. With that in mind, I struggle to think of a company that wouldn’t find a voice use case that is sympathetic to their brand.

Amazing. Jamie, this has been an enlightening chat! So a huge thanks again for taking the time to chat with me today. Hopefully we’ll catch up again soon.

—

To stay in the loop with the latest news, interviews and features from the world of toy and game design, sign up to our weekly newsletter here

The post SoapBox Labs’ Jamie Beaumont on how voice tech can help toy firms create magical conversational experiences for kids appeared first on Mojo Nation.

All this and more is discussed by So Sound’s TJ Morrison, Virsix Games’ Zai Ortiz and Night Zookeeper’s Lucy Gill in this panel session chaired by SoapBox Labs’ Patricia Scanlon.

This panel forms part of Mojo Nation’s Virtual Play Creators Conference. A big thanks to our sponsors:
• The Toy Association
• Hasbro
• Spin Master
• PlayMonster

The post WATCH: Voice Tech, Toys and Games appeared first on Mojo Nation.

SoapBox Labs is a voice-tech company that wants to transform how kids interact with technology using their voices.

The firm’s privacy-first, low-code, proprietary technology delivers 95% accuracy for kids ages 2 to 12 of all accents and dialects.

An R&D driven company with an ever-expanding team of world-class AI and machine learning experts, SoapBox Labs is helmed by CEO Dr. Martyn Farrows. He boasts over 25 years’ experience in industry, with a particular focus on learning technologies and AI for children.

We caught up with Martyn to find out more about how the firm can help toy companies and inventors create great voice-enabled products for kids.

For anyone who may not have come across SoapBox Labs, what do you specialise in?
SoapBox Labs is a voice technology company that specialises in voice solutions, especially for kids. We’re now eight years old and since our founding we’ve been building voice solutions that offer accuracy and privacy – and that understand kids’ voices no matter their age or accent.

So, if you’re a kid-focused company that’s looking to add voice to toys, games, robots, literacy or language learning products for kids two years and older, SoapBox is the solution for you.

Easy to integrate out of the box, our voice engine is a low-code, high accuracy voice-for-anything-kids solution that can be delivered online or offline.

There’s lots of folks across the toy industry that could work with you, but let’s start with toy companies: how can they engage with what you’re doing?
For the smaller “disruptor” companies in the toy and connected toy space, we encourage them to dive right into our portal, access our API and docs, and start experimenting with our accuracy and privacy-driven voice technology.

Larger companies tend to see voice as a strategic opportunity and direction for their business, so for those companies we offer one-to-three-day workshops followed by a POC – proof of concept – that we build collaboratively. The workshop helps key decision makers across the business to understand the power of voice-enabling their products and to identify products in market – or on their roadmap – that are best suited to a voice-enabled experience for kids.

And for any inventors reading, if they have concepts that involve voice tech, how can you help?
Yes, we love working with inventors! Similar to the way we engage with smaller toy companies, the absolute best place for inventors to start is by signing up to our portal for free access to our API and developer docs. Even when an inventor’s end goal is an offline experience – with voice on an embedded chip in a physical toy for example – we encourage them to take the first step by experimenting with our online API.

It’s so easy to integrate and gives them a feel for the power of voice interactions for kids to set their imaginations alight!

Sounds fantastic – we’ll send them there at the end of the article! What do you think is the key to making voice effective in toys? Are there any examples of products out there that you feel nail it?
We’ve completed a couple of very exciting POCs over the last few months that really “nail” the voice experience for kids with toys, but it’ll be a little while longer before these actual products hit the market.

Baseline, for voice to be effective in toys, it needs to be two things: Accurate – this means actually working in real world kid scenarios where there’s background noise or where a kid is talking to their toy but is also pausing, hesitating, whispering or shouting.

And what’s the second thing that voice tech needs to be at its best?
Privacy. Voice technology needs to have been built using a privacy-by-design approach, meaning that by default it does not collect, store or process kids’ voice data for commercial purposes.

We are one of the few privacy-by-design companies whose technology proactively protects kids’ voice data privacy.

That’s great to hear. Now, before I let you go, one last question! How do you and the SoapBox team fuel your creativity?
Great question! There’s a lot of creativity at SoapBox, thanks in part to the diversity of our team when it comes to race, gender, and age. Last time I counted we were 13 different nationalities from four continents. Many of us are also parents and being a parent of young kids is likely one of the most creative pursuits of my day, week or year!

Absolutely. Now, how can someone reach you if they’re interested in connecting? And how can they access your developer portal?
To access our API and developer portal, just sign up here. And for companies interested in a voice workshop or in exploring a strategic partnership with us, please email us on Hello@SoapBoxLabs.com.

—

To stay in the loop with the latest news, interviews and features from the world of toy and game design, sign up to our weekly newsletter here

The post SoapBox Labs CEO Dr Martyn Farrows on helping toy firms and inventors create great voice-enabled toys appeared first on Mojo Nation.