Israeli start-up, Hi Auto has raised US$4.5M in a seed round to commercialise an audio-visual solution for speaker separation and speech enhancement in vehicles.
The seed round was led by Israeli car importer, Delek Motors and Hi Auto’s chairman, Zohar Zisapel.
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Other investors were Allied Holdings (holding company of car importer Champion Motors), Singapore-based Goldbell Group and Plug & Play.
Hi Auto is planning to use the funds from the seed round to complete the development of its first product, launch sales and expand its team. The company has already established contacts with automotive companies, which are expected to examine its technology in early 2020.
Hi Auto says speech recognition platforms suffer from poor recognition rates in a noisy environment such as children in the back seat of cars, ambulances passing by, or heavy rain. Hi Auto maintains its audio-visual approach, which combines a microphone and a camera that tracks the speaker’s lips, will eliminate all noise and will make speech recognition in cars work reliably under any noise condition.
At this stage Hi Auto is focusing on the automotive sector. However, the solution can be applied in a range of use cases in various fields where there is a need for speech recognition and clear conversations, including automotive, contact centres, video conferences and robots serving customers in the hospitality industry.
Hi Auto is based in Tel Aviv and was founded in February, 2019 by CEO, Roy Baharav, CTO, Eyal Shapira and Zohar Zisapel, who serves as acting chairman and investor in the company.
“When devices operate in multiple speaker and noisy environments such as cars, their recognition reliability goes down dramatically,” said Baharav.
“Our audio-visual approach is able to focus on the driver and remove all noises as if the speaker was talking from a recording room. Our solution will make the speech recognition experience in the car and in other environments more satisfying for consumers and enable the introduction of more complex and sensitive capabilities by OEMs.”
Hi Auto will demonstrate at CES 2020 in Las Vegas next January.
