AssemblyAI (YC S17) – API for customizable speech recognition

Hey HN, I’m the founder of AssemblyAI (https://www.assemblyai.com). We're building an API for customizable speech recognition. Developers and companies use our API for things like transcribing phone calls and building voice powered smart devices. Unlike current speech recognition APIs, developers can customize our API to more accurately recognize an unlimited amount of industry specific words or phrases unique to what they're building without any training required. For example, you can recognize thousands of product or person names with our API. Or you can more accurately recognize commands/phrases common or custom to your use case.

We've developed our own deep neural network speech recognition architecture, and aren't using any open source speech frameworks like Kaldi or Sphinx (just Tensorflow). Because of this, we're able to run things more affordably and pass those savings on to developers.

I used to work on projects that had speech recognition requirements before starting AssemblyAI, and saw how limiting, expensive, and hard to work with traditional speech recognition services and APIs were. We want to help developers and companies easily build products with speech recognition.

Would love feedback from the HN community on what we're building, and if you have any questions about deep learning or deep learning in production ask away!