France at CES 2023: Vivoca

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas from January 5th to 8th, 2023 brings together hundreds of startups for the biggest “tech” event on the planet. Among the French exhibitors is Vivoca, a French startup developing sound technologies.

Vivoka is a startup offering an all-in-one solution that allows any company to build their own offline voice AI in record time.

Vivoka CEO William Simonin answered questions from Engineering Techniques.

Engineering Techniques: What is Vivoca’s story?

William Simon’s: Founded in 2015, Vivoka is a leading AI-based voice technology company. After graduation, its CEO William Simon got the idea to create Vivoka after watching the movie “Iron Man” with his partner Vincent Leroy. Jarvis, the revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) shown in the film, inspired them so much that they wanted to make it a reality. When it comes to human-machine interface, nothing is more intuitive and logical than voice. They realized that there is no such thing as a smart voice assistant. At that time, voice assistants such as Amazon Echo or Google Home did not yet exist. So they started developing their own voice recognition system.

Thanks to the VDK (Voice Development Kit), Vivoka offers an all-in-one voice recognition solution that allows any company to create their own onboard/offline, high-performance and secure voice assistant in record time. Vivoka has won several innovation awards and established leading partnerships with key players in the audio market. Vivoka has a portfolio of over 100 customers from all industries and is committed to bringing people closer to technology through voice.

What sector of activity does your company operate in?

Vivoka is used in all sectors: logistics, robotics, retail, healthcare, smart glasses, defense and more. invents, manufactures and distributes expert solutions in the field of indoor audio technologies that meet the needs and realities of companies.

What products do you develop?

The brand’s flagship product, VDK: Voice Development Kit, is a software development kit specializing in voice. This allows any company to easily and quickly develop an on-board voice solution in multiple languages and compatibility.

This product addresses a market problem: receiving sound is a real challenge right now. The Voice Development Kit solves this problem by bringing together the best technologies, owners and partners available today, reducing time to market for voice solutions and the need for human and financial resources to launch these projects.

For which customers?

Our customers are large accounts and SMEs in sectors such as logistics, robotics, IOT, defense, industry or healthcare. We are targeting all companies looking to add a voice interface to a device to potentially facilitate and simplify human-computer interaction.

42 languages compatible with our technology today allow us to target these companies worldwide.

What are the key challenges around IoT today in terms of connectivity, energy and service?

Designing a fast solution that is compatible with all systems and all languages on the market and above all offline and therefore independent of the Internet is a problem that many companies are trying to solve.

The Voice Development Kit solves this problem by bringing together the best technologies, owners and partners available today, reducing time to market for voice solutions and the need for human and financial resources to launch these projects.

What are the innovations specific to your products?

We have developed the first software development kit that includes all the audio technologies needed to create an onboard and offline audio solution. A multi-functional software development kit SDK combined with an intuitive graphical user interface.

It allows any company and any developer to configure a multilingual offline voice interface (independent of the Internet) in record time, consisting of one or more voice technologies (transcription, voice synthesis, voice biometrics, etc.). .

First of all, thanks to the simple and intuitive graphical interface: many plugins can be used in parallel to create sound functions. With VDK, everything is in one view in the same application and the same interface.

VDK also offers a wide range of widgets for development: Grammar Editor, COPFile Editor, Sound Studio, etc. All these tools are available for different stages of creating offline audio features: creating well-known vocabularies, customizing synthetic sounds, dynamic file management…

Next, VDK comes with clear documentation to guide the user. In the early stages of creating an audio interface, navigation is often difficult. To reduce this complexity, tutorials (ASR, TTS creation, etc.) are available to guide you step-by-step through the development of your offline audio solution.

The most common use cases are linked with code examples to make the technologies easier to understand. For more complex cases, our full documentation and services are available on the Voice Development Kit platform.

What do you expect from your attendance at CES 2023?

This is our fourth participation. The year 2023 is strategic for Vivoca as we want to accelerate the company’s internationalization to build on our frenzied growth pace. It is for this reason that CES is an important event to meet new partners or customers and, above all, to promote voice recognition in the industry.