Close Menu
TechBrunchTechBrunch
  • Home
  • AI
  • Apps
  • Crypto
  • Security
  • Startups
  • TechCrunch
  • Venture

Subscribe to Updates

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news

Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!

What's Hot

iOS 19: All the rumor changes that Apple could bring to the new operating system

June 7, 2025

The Trump administration is aiming for Biden and Obama's cybersecurity rules

June 7, 2025

WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year's meeting

June 7, 2025
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
TechBrunchTechBrunch
  • Home
  • AI

    OpenAI seeks to extend human lifespans with the help of longevity startups

    January 17, 2025

    Farewell to the $200 million woolly mammoth and TikTok

    January 17, 2025

    Nord Security founder launches Nexos.ai to help enterprises move AI projects from pilot to production

    January 17, 2025

    Data proves it remains difficult for startups to raise capital, even though VCs invested $75 billion in the fourth quarter

    January 16, 2025

    Apple suspends AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts

    January 16, 2025
  • Apps

    iOS 19: All the rumor changes that Apple could bring to the new operating system

    June 7, 2025

    WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year's meeting

    June 7, 2025

    Trump Mask feud was perfect for X and jumped on the app store chart

    June 6, 2025

    iOS 19: All the rumor changes that Apple could bring to the new operating system

    June 6, 2025

    WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year's meeting

    June 6, 2025
  • Crypto

    xNotify Polymarket as partner in the official forecast market

    June 6, 2025

    Circle IPOs are giving hope to more startups waiting to be published to more startups

    June 5, 2025

    GameStop bought $500 million in Bitcoin

    May 28, 2025

    Vote for the session you want to watch in 2025

    May 26, 2025

    Save $900 + 90% from 2 tickets to destroy 2025 in the last 24 hours

    May 25, 2025
  • Security

    The Trump administration is aiming for Biden and Obama's cybersecurity rules

    June 7, 2025

    After data is wiped out, Kiranapro co-founders cannot rule out external hacks

    June 7, 2025

    Humanity appoints national security experts to governing trusts

    June 6, 2025

    Italian lawmakers say Italy used spyware to target immigrant activists' mobile phones, but not for journalists

    June 6, 2025

    Humanity unveils custom AI models for US national security customers

    June 5, 2025
  • Startups

    7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

    March 24, 2025

    AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

    March 24, 2025

    20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

    March 22, 2025

    Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

    March 21, 2025

    Startup Weekly: Wiz bets paid off at M&A Rich Week

    March 21, 2025
  • TechCrunch

    OpenSea takes a long-term view with a focus on UX despite NFT sales remaining low

    February 8, 2024

    AI will save software companies' growth dreams

    February 8, 2024

    B2B and B2C are not about who buys, but how you sell

    February 5, 2024

    It's time for venture capital to break away from fast fashion

    February 3, 2024

    a16z's Chris Dixon believes it's time to focus on blockchain use cases rather than speculation

    February 2, 2024
  • Venture

    Why investing in a growing AI startup is risky and more complicated

    June 6, 2025

    Startup Battlefield 200: Only 3 days left

    June 6, 2025

    Book all TC Stage Exhibitor Tables before ending today

    June 6, 2025

    Less than 48 hours left until display at TC at all stages

    June 5, 2025

    TC Session: AI will be on sale today at Berkeley

    June 5, 2025
TechBrunchTechBrunch

Can you hear me now?AI acoustics combats noisy audio with generative AI

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchMarch 25, 20245 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Telegram LinkedIn Tumblr WhatsApp Email
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Telegram Email


Noisy recordings of interviews and speeches are the bane of any audio engineer's existence. But a German startup hopes to solve this problem with a unique technological approach that uses generative AI to improve the clarity of audio in videos.

Today, AI-coustics has emerged from stealth with €1.9 million in funding. According to co-founder and CEO Fabian Seipel, AI-coustics' technology goes beyond standard noise suppression and works across and in conjunction with any device or speaker.

“Our core mission is to make every digital interaction – whether it's a conference call, a consumer device, or a casual social media video – as clear as broadcast from a professional studio,” Seipel told TechCrunch. said in an interview.

Seipel, an audio engineer by training, co-founded AI-coustics in 2021 with Colvin Jadicke, a lecturer in machine learning at the Technical University of Berlin. Seipel and Jadicke met while studying audio technology at the Technical University of Berlin, where they frequently encountered poor audio quality. The quality of the online courses and tutorials they had to take.

“We have been driven by a personal mission to overcome the pervasive challenge of poor audio quality in digital communications,” Seipel said. “My hearing is slightly impaired by his music production in my early twenties, but I've always struggled with his content and lectures online. That's why we focused on the topic of audio quality and clarity in the first place. I decided to work on it.”

The market for AI-powered noise suppression and voice enhancement software is already very robust. AI-coustics' competitors include Insoundz, which uses generative AI to enhance streaming and pre-recorded audio clips, and Veed.io, a video editing suite with tools to remove background noise from clips.

But Seipel says AI acoustics has a unique approach to developing AI mechanisms that do the actual noise reduction work.

The startup uses models trained on audio samples recorded at the startup's studio in Berlin, the home of AI acoustics. People are paid to record samples, though Seipel didn't say how much, that are added to a dataset used to train AI acoustics noise reduction models.

“We have developed a unique approach that simulates audio artifacts and issues (such as noise, reverberation, compression, band-limited microphones, distortion, and clipping) during the training process,” said Seipel. Masu.

Some may object to the one-time reward system for creators that AI-coustics is developing. Given that the models the company is training can be very lucrative in the long run. (There is a healthy debate about whether the creators of training data for AI models deserve residuals for their contributions.) But perhaps the bigger, more pressing concern is bias.

It is well established that speech recognition algorithms can create biases, biases that ultimately harm users. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that speech recognition at a major company was twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe the audio of a black speaker compared to a white speaker. .

To combat this, Seipel said AI Acoustics is focused on recruiting “diverse” audio sample contributors. He added: “Scale and diversity are key to eliminating bias and making technology compatible with all languages, speaker identities, ages, accents and genders.”

It wasn't the most scientific test, but I uploaded three video clips (an interview with an 18th century farmer, a car driving demonstration, and an Israeli-Palestinian conflict protest) to the AI-coustics platform. to see how well each performs in our tests. . AI acoustics certainly delivered on its promise of increased clarity. To my ears, the processed clip has far less ambient background noise drowning out the speakers.

Here are some previous 18th century peasant clips:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Interview-With-An-87-Year-Old-Farmer-1929.mp3

onwards:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Interview-With-An-87-Year-Old-Farmer-1929-full-enhanced-by-acoustics.mp3

Seipel said AI-coustics' technology could be used to enhance real-time and recorded audio, and perhaps even be incorporated into devices such as soundbars, smartphones, and headphones to automatically increase audio clarity. That's what I think. Currently, AI-coustics offers web apps and APIs for post-processing audio and video recordings, as well as his SDK that integrates AI-coustics' platform into existing workflows, apps, and hardware.

Seipel said AI-coustics makes money through a combination of subscriptions, on-demand pricing and licensing, and currently has five enterprise customers and 20,000 users (though not all of them are paying). . The roadmap for the coming months includes expanding his four-person team at the company and improving the underlying voice enhancement model.

“Prior to our initial investment, AI-coustics had a fairly lean operation with a low burn rate to weather the challenges of the VC investment market,” Seipel said. “AI-coustics currently has a strong network of investors and mentors seeking advice in Germany and the UK. Due to our strong technology foundation and ability to serve different markets using the same database and core technology , the company will be able to achieve flexibility and smaller pivots.”

When asked whether audio mastering technologies like AI acoustics will take away jobs, as some experts fear, Seipel said the number of hours currently held by human audio engineers will be reduced. He pointed out the potential of AI audio to streamline such work.

“Content production studios and broadcast managers can save time and money by using AI acoustics to automate parts of the audio production process while maintaining the highest audio quality,” he said. Ta. “Audio quality and clarity remains a vexing issue, not just for content production and consumption, but for nearly all consumer and professional devices. You may benefit.”

The funding came in the form of equity and debt tranches from Connect Ventures, Inovia Capital, FOV Ventures, and Ableton CFO Jan Bohl.



Source link

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

OpenAI seeks to extend human lifespans with the help of longevity startups

January 17, 2025

Farewell to the $200 million woolly mammoth and TikTok

January 17, 2025

Nord Security founder launches Nexos.ai to help enterprises move AI projects from pilot to production

January 17, 2025

Data proves it remains difficult for startups to raise capital, even though VCs invested $75 billion in the fourth quarter

January 16, 2025

Apple suspends AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts

January 16, 2025

Nvidia releases more tools and guardrails to help enterprises adopt AI agents

January 16, 2025

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Reviews
Editors Picks

7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

March 24, 2025

AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

March 24, 2025

20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

March 22, 2025

Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

March 21, 2025
About Us
About Us

Welcome to Tech Brunch, your go-to destination for cutting-edge insights, news, and analysis in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cryptocurrency, Technology, and Startups. At Tech Brunch, we are passionate about exploring the latest trends, innovations, and developments shaping the future of these dynamic industries.

Our Picks

iOS 19: All the rumor changes that Apple could bring to the new operating system

June 7, 2025

The Trump administration is aiming for Biden and Obama's cybersecurity rules

June 7, 2025

WWDC 2025: What to expect from this year's meeting

June 7, 2025

Subscribe to Updates

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news

Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!

© 2025 TechBrunch. Designed by TechBrunch.
  • Home
  • About Tech Brunch
  • Advertise with Tech Brunch
  • Contact us
  • DMCA Notice
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.