While improving the lives of people with disabilities is a laudable goal, accessibility technology has traditionally been unpopular with venture capitalists. In 2022, disability technology companies attracted about $4 billion in early-stage investment, which was only a fraction of the amount invested in fintech.
One reason for this is that disability technology startups are often considered too niche to achieve business viability, at least at the scale that venture capital requires. By definition, these are supposed to be built for minorities. However, some startups in this space are starting to serve more people, and throwing in AI is always helpful.
Both cases require a balance. Without losing sight of your startup's mission statement, the broader business case needs to make sense. On the other hand, passing the due diligence sniff test requires leveraging AI in a special way.
Some accessibility-focused startups understand these needs, and their strategies are worth checking out. Here are four European startups that are doing just that.
visualize
Image credit: Visualfy
Visualfy uses AI to improve the lives of people with hearing loss. The Spanish startup focuses on safety and autonomy, including voice recognition AI that recognizes fire alarms and baby cries in the home. “AI is critical to our business,” CEO Manel Alcaide told TechCrunch last month.
The company offers consumers an app that also serves as a companion to Visualfy Home, a hardware suite consisting of three detectors and a main device. The company has also entered the public sector with his Visualfy Places. It's no coincidence that the startup recently raised funding from Spain's state-owned railway company Renfe.
One of the reasons Visualfy is gaining traction on the B2B side is because of the need to provide accessibility in public spaces, especially when health and safety is at stake.
In an interview, Arcade explained that the devices and PA systems that Visualfy installs in places like stadiums can also monitor air quality and other metrics. In the EU, achieving these other goals could help companies win subsidies while doing the right thing for deaf people.
The latter is still a top priority for Visualfy, as the company is incorporated as a B Corp and employs both normal-hearing and normal-hearing people. Including Deaf people at every step is a moral stance that says “nothing for us without us.” But it's also common sense for better design, Alkaid says.
niceper
Image credit: Audas Technologies
People with complete hearing loss are only a small part of a large and growing group. By 2050, 2.5 billion people are expected to have some degree of hearing loss. Many people do not wear hearing aids for a variety of reasons, including stigma and cost. This is exactly the demographic that his Dutch B2B startup Audus Technologies is targeting with its product Knisper.
Knisper uses AI to make audio more audible in environments like movie theaters, museums, public transportation, and work calls. In practice, this means splitting the audio and mixing it back into a clearer track. This allows anyone to listen comfortably, even without hearing loss, without increasing background volume noise (something not all hearing aid companies can say).
Marciano Ferrier, former otolaryngologist and founder of Odus, explained that before AI it would have been impossible to achieve similar results. Knisper was trained on thousands of videos in multiple languages, including variations such as background noise and audio distortion. This took some time, but Odus is now out of development and focused on hiring, managing director Joost Taverne told TechCrunch in February.
“We are already working with a number of museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” said Tavern, a former congressman and diplomat who was in the United States. “We're also working with a Dutch publisher to produce an audiobook, an audiobook of Anne Frank's diary that is accessible even for people with hearing loss. And now we've created a solution for the workspace. I got it.”
Entering the B2B market is not an easy path, so it makes sense for Audas to focus on clients such as museums. There is a lot of noise, so the audio guide may be difficult to hear. Using Knisper's technology to make speech more intelligible benefits people with hearing loss as well as the general public, making it easier to implement.
Whisps
Image credit: Whisp
Fellow Dutch startup Whispp also focuses on speeches, but from a different angle. As TechCrunch reported from CES earlier this year, the technology converts whispers into natural speech in real time.
Whispp's primary target audience is “a currently underserved group of 300 million people around the world with speech disorders who have lost their voices but can still articulate clearly,” the site says. are doing.
For example, people with voice disorders who can only whisper or use their esophageal voice. Or some people, like CEO Joris Castermans, stutter. He is well aware of how little impact there is when speaking in a whisper.
Solutions such as text-to-speech apps already exist for people with impaired intelligibility due to ALS, MS, Parkinson's disease, or stroke, but these have drawbacks such as long latencies. For those who can still articulate, it may be too much of a trade-off.
Thanks to audio-to-audio AI, Whispp can generate real-time, language-independent, and deliver realistic, natural-sounding audio. It can even sound like your own voice if you can provide a sample.
Whispp is also more secure than alternatives because there's no text in between, Castermans told TechCrunch. This could open up use cases for silent patients who need confidential conversations, he said.
It's unclear how much users without voice issues would be willing to pay for Whispp's technology, but there are some monetization routes it should explore with its core users, such as subscriptions to voice calling apps.
acapella
Image credit: Acapella Group
Whispp emphasizes the need to save your audio for later use. This process, known as voice banking, is what Acapella hopes to facilitate with the service it launched last year.
Acquired by Swedish tech accessibility company Tobii Dynavox in 2022 for €9.8 million, Acapela Group has been in the text-to-speech space for decades, but only recently has AI changed the game for voice cloning. It is about.
The results will be much better and the process will also be faster. This lowers the bar for voice banking, and while not everyone will do it yet, there may be demand for people who have been diagnosed with certain illnesses and know they are at risk of losing their voice. .
Acapela does not charge a fee for the initial stage of the service, which consists of a 50-sentence record. Users must purchase audio directly through Acapela or through a third party (such as a partner, reseller, or national health insurance program) only if they need to install audio on their device.
In addition to the new possibilities unlocked by AI, the examples above illustrate some of the routes startups are exploring to expand beyond their core target of users with disabilities.
One idea is that a large addressable market increases future revenues and spreads costs. But for our customers and partners, it's also a way to stay true to the definition of accessibility: “quality of entry or use by all people, including people with disabilities.”