Creative Destruction Lab (CDL)

Sayso is a company that specializes in speech editing software, utilizing audio technology and artificial intelligence to enhance communication for English speakers globally. The company's innovative software focuses on accent augmentation, helping users improve their accents to facilitate clearer and more effective communication. By targeting both native and non-native English speakers, Sayso aims to empower individuals to express their expertise more clearly and to foster better understanding among diverse audiences.

Alan AI, Inc is a Sunnyvale, California-based provider of a voice-based and generative AI platform for enterprise applications. The platform enables enterprises to develop versatile agents to boost productivity, automate workflows, and improve decision-making, with explainable AI reasoning and human-in-the-loop controls. It integrates with enterprise data sources and existing APIs and supports edge, on-premises, and hybrid cloud deployments. Through natural language interfaces, the platform guides users through configuration, insights, troubleshooting, remediation and automation tasks, often delivering rapid deployment and significant productivity gains. The company has a Silicon Valley core and a regional presence in Hyderabad, India, and was founded by Ramu Sunkara and Andrey Ryabov, whose prior venture Qik was acquired by Skype.

VocaliD is a technology company that creates custom, natural-sounding digital voices for assistive communication. Using machine learning, proprietary voice blending algorithms, and a crowdsourced Voicebank, it can generate high-quality voices in hours rather than months. The company offers a text-to-speech mobile solution that enables users who rely on devices to speak to create digitized voices tailored to their vocal identity. Its voices integrate with vocal identity software and compatible devices to form digital vocal identities that reflect human speech. By simplifying voice creation and delivery, VocaliD supports people with speech impairments to express themselves and participate in everyday interactions with others and technology.

Babbly is a company focused on enhancing early childhood development through its innovative monitoring platform. It has developed a mobile application that allows parents to track and support their child's speech development from birth to twenty-four months. Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Babbly's platform analyzes voice data to provide insights into a child's cognitive growth, language, and social skills. By enabling parents to record and evaluate their child's speech, the app helps them monitor progress and foster developmental milestones effectively. Babbly aims to create the world's largest data platform dedicated to supporting parents in nurturing their children's development.

HiringBranch is a technology company that develops AI-powered soft skills assessment tools. It specializes in enhancing the efficiency and consistency of candidate hiring processes by evaluating communication, language, and employability through mock simulations.

Sensi.AI develops audio-based care intelligence technology for home care providers, acting as a 24/7 care copilot that analyzes voice data to form a holistic understanding of a senior's physical, emotional, and cognitive needs. The platform aims to improve care quality and operational efficiency by enabling continuous monitoring and alerts, including detection of abnormal patterns that could indicate changes in condition or potential maltreatment, with a focus on supporting families and caregivers in assessing service quality while preserving privacy.

Soundskrit is a Montreal-based company that specializes in the development of innovative velocity-based directional microphones designed to enhance audio capture in smart devices. Founded in 2017, the company aims to address the limitations of traditional pressure-based microphones, which pick up sound from all directions and often require multiple units to isolate specific audio sources. Soundskrit's bio-inspired technology measures the velocity of incoming sound, allowing a single microphone to effectively separate and identify sounds from various directions without compromising size or audio quality. This advancement significantly improves speech recognition and sound localization capabilities, enabling a new range of features in consumer electronics, particularly in noisy environments and multi-speaker scenarios.

Soundskrit is a Montreal-based company that specializes in the development of innovative velocity-based directional microphones designed to enhance audio capture in smart devices. Founded in 2017, the company aims to address the limitations of traditional pressure-based microphones, which pick up sound from all directions and often require multiple units to isolate specific audio sources. Soundskrit's bio-inspired technology measures the velocity of incoming sound, allowing a single microphone to effectively separate and identify sounds from various directions without compromising size or audio quality. This advancement significantly improves speech recognition and sound localization capabilities, enabling a new range of features in consumer electronics, particularly in noisy environments and multi-speaker scenarios.

Babbly is a company focused on enhancing early childhood development through its innovative monitoring platform. It has developed a mobile application that allows parents to track and support their child's speech development from birth to twenty-four months. Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Babbly's platform analyzes voice data to provide insights into a child's cognitive growth, language, and social skills. By enabling parents to record and evaluate their child's speech, the app helps them monitor progress and foster developmental milestones effectively. Babbly aims to create the world's largest data platform dedicated to supporting parents in nurturing their children's development.

Synthiam is a pioneering software development and technology distribution platform focused on making robot programming accessible to a wide audience, including researchers, DIY enthusiasts, enterprises, manufacturers, and educational institutions. The company aims to democratize robotics by providing user-friendly tools that empower individuals to program robots without requiring prior software development experience. Its platform features a diverse range of applications such as computer vision, movement gaits, speech recognition, and navigation, enabling users to integrate the latest technologies into their robotic products. Synthiam's mission is to facilitate innovation in robotics, ultimately contributing to a safer and healthier future through the widespread availability of sophisticated robotic solutions.

Fluent.ai is a Montreal-based company founded in 2015 that specializes in advanced speech recognition solutions. The company employs a unique machine learning approach that enables its technology to understand natural phrases across various languages, accents, and challenging noise environments, such as those found in smart homes and connected vehicles. Fluent.ai's speech recognition engine is designed to provide personalized voice user interfaces that can function both online and offline, making it suitable for a wide range of applications, including wearables and virtual reality headsets. By focusing on understanding the meaning of audible speech rather than converting it to text, Fluent.ai offers a reliable and flexible solution for businesses aiming to enhance user interaction through voice technology.

WinterLight Labs Inc. is a Toronto-based company founded in 2015 that specializes in developing a speech-based platform for the detection and monitoring of cognitive and mental diseases, including dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The company's innovative AI technology analyzes natural speech samples to quantify various speech and language patterns, enabling the accurate assessment of cognitive health. By utilizing a brief one-minute speech sample, WinterLight's platform can characterize aspects such as lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, semantic content, and articulation, effectively capturing the speaker's cognitive state. This diagnostic tool has significant applications across clinical trials, long-term care, primary care, and speech-language pathology, facilitating the early detection of cognitive impairment and tracking disease progression.