Companies are betting big on generative ai to gain a competitive advantage. But adoption challenges remain. According to a ai-to-gain-competitive-edge-despite-hurdles-to-adoption-and-m-and-a-challenges”>recent In the EY survey, a significant share of companies looking to adopt generative ai say the field's rapid progress (and the rise of vendors claiming ai expertise) is complicating their implementation prospects.
However, you wouldn't know it from their expenses. According to an IDC forecast, global investments in “ai-centric” systems could reach $154 billion by the end of the year. And an MIT technology review ai-spending-next-year/”>survey found that 50% of companies plan to increase budgets on data infrastructure and artificial intelligence by more than 25% over the next year.
The boom is benefiting emerging companies such as AssemblyAI (which TechCrunch has covered three times before), a self-described “applied ai” company that researches, trains, and deploys ai models for developers and product teams to integrate into their apps and services.
AssemblyAI says its paying customer base grew 200% from last year to 4,000 brands and that its ai platform now handles around 25 million API calls per day. Additionally, more than 200,000 developers are building on the platform, AssemblyAI says, using it to process more than 10 terabytes of data a day.
“ai models are improving and evolving rapidly,” AssemblyAI co-founder and CEO Dylan Fox told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Companies that leverage AssemblyAI’s API platform can focus on creating new ai products, applications, and workflows without having to focus on model development, training, and keeping up with the rapid pace of model innovation. “They also don’t need to worry about deploying ai models at scale themselves, which is extremely difficult to do at low cost and with high availability.”
The AssemblyAI development platform.
AssemblyAI's success has caught the attention of big-name investors, some of whom recently contributed to a new tranche of funding for the startup. Accel led a $50 million round in AssemblyAI, announced today, with participation from former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Insight Partners and Y Combinator. The total capital raised by AssemblyAI now stands at $115 million.
Fox, a machine learning engineer, founded AssemblyAI in late 2017. He says he was inspired by the Amazon Echo, which Fox says is one of the first great examples of products made possible by better ai systems for voice.
“When I started exploring building my own products with various voice ai models available at the time, I was disappointed that most companies were still offering legacy and inaccurate voice ai models through difficult-to-use development products. “said Fox. “This motivated me to start AssemblyAI, with the vision of creating superhuman ai models, available through an easy-to-use developer platform, that would unlock entirely new classes of ai applications to build.”
Today, AssemblyAI offers ai models, specifically speech-centric models, designed to perform tasks such as speech-to-text conversion, speaker identification, content moderation, and speech summarization through an API. Customers like Fireflies, a meeting transcription app, running content ranging from phone calls and Zoom meetings to podcasts and videos across the models, Fox says.
Now, there is no shortage of open and proprietary voice models, from rival startups like Deepgram, Rev and Speechmatics, as well as tech giants like Google Cloud, Azure and AWS. But Fox argues, rightly or wrongly, that AssemblyAI models are more “advanced,” “accurate,” “capable,” and “feature-rich” than the competition.
“Large cloud companies have similar product offerings… but they are infrequently updated, less precise, come with far fewer features, and are much more difficult to integrate,” he continued.
That said, AssemblyAI is not resting on its laurels. A portion of the new funding will go toward a “universal” voice model that the company is training on more than a petabyte of voice data, which will launch later this year,” Fox says. AssemblyAI is also expanding its staff, with the aim of increasing its workforce of 115 people by between 50% and 75% next year.
“We're working to build 'Stripe models for ai,' where developers and product teams will be able to easily access next-generation ai through a simple API,” Fox said. “By providing these things to customers, they can focus on building more vertical applications and internal workflows that leverage our proprietary data and AssemblyAI's ever-improving speech ai models… We have years of track record thanks to the new funding round and are seeing an incredible amount of demand and product adoption given the widespread momentum around ai.”
