Audioburst Secures $10 Million to Develop AI That Parses Live and Recorded Audio

By Viraj T On Apr 23, 2019

Audioburst received fresh funding of $10 million to strengthen its AI development towards parsing, labeling and tagging of live and recorded audio. This is Audioburst’s second cash influx after a Series A round that raised $14.4 million placing the grand total to $25 million.

“The investments signal an industry acknowledgment for consumer demand of voice-based experiences, and Audioburst’s unmatched ability to deliver that technology,” said co-founder and CEO Amir Hirsh, who added that the company will team up with Dentsu to build out channels that deliver rich listening insights and content to clients advertising in audio. “It also provides us the ability to expand and expedite our technology offering, and tap into a larger ecosystem of investors and partners in the car, media, advertising, and technology spaces.”

Audioburst leverages Natural Language Processing and automatic speech recognition to segregate TeraBytes of audio coming from a plethora of broadcasters and publishers. This data is then processed into short-form audio, or what the company likes to call it — bursts. The attached metadata to these bursts gets processed via Audioburst’s APIs to transform into customized playlists or immersive voice controls. Popular brands such as LG, Bragi, Samsung, et al. are a few of Audioburst’s clients.

Audioburst operates differently for clients and its clients’ customers. For customers, Audioburst has developed a fully-functional portal for audio promotions on a large number of channels. As for Audioburst’s listeners, the company has provided for an analytical dashboard so that they get a 360-degree view of the content that they are being exposed to.

Currently largely focused on the developer community, on a micro-scale the company is providing for voice apps in devices powered by Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s assistant. Users can get rich information pertaining to current events, weather, traffic, etc. by leveraging on Audioburst’s apps. Also, Audioburst hosts a web tool for users to extract relevant sound bytes from audio streams.

However, Audioburst’s business heavily relies on data. The company’s platform generates a ‘listening identity’ which provides advertisers, publishers, and brands lucid access to consumer listening patterns allowing them to target promotions that can be far more rewarding. This service is similar to what Pandora or Apple has for its trend analytics reports.

2016 saw 20% of search queries on Google’s search engine application and its Android devices
Just two years ago, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced the digital audio advertisement market to be worth $1.6 billion

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“The growing popularity of Amazon Echo, Google Home, and voice-activated apps has created an exponential demand for audio content,” explained Hirsh. “Users have learned to get their factual answers spoken to them by the different devices but are now looking for a winning content experience.”

“We want to change the way people experience audio content. Audioburst is essentially the Spotify for spoken word content. Rather than tuning into a pre-programmed station or playlist, our AI builds a unique audio stream for every listener,” Hirsh said. “Each stream is built from short audio clips that are cut from diverse professional audio sources.”

The company has offices in New York, Palo Alto, and Tel Aviv.

Major investors include –

Dentsu
Hyundai
Samsung Ventures
Nippon
Advanced Media

Audioburst’s immediate plans are the development of –

Smart speakers
Mobile
In-car infotainment
Wearable tech spaces

The company also has plans of launching itself in the Japanese market, subsequently embedding its systems with Japanese language support.