Voysis, a Dublin-headquartered voice technology start-up that raised $8 million (€6.7 million) earlier this year, has opened its first office in the UK.
Ian Hodson, former head of voice at Google, will head up the new 10-strong team in Edinburgh.
Mr Hodson, who joined Voysis in May, was in charge of Google’s text to speech programme and provided pivotal input on Google Maps, Google Assistant and Android voice.
Voysis has developed a voice recognition platform driven by natural language instructions and search capabilities for third-party enterprises.
Founded by Peter Cahill, who has spent 15 years researching speech technology and neural network research, the start-up has been busy scaling its team in recent months.
Having closed a series A financing round led by US venture capitalists Polaris in February the firm opened an office in Boston.
The opening of the Edinburgh unit comes as tech giants such as Amazon and Google have increased their presence in the voice-powered technology space with products such as Echo and Google Home.
Despite the growing competition, Voysis claims its platform allows more accurate natural language queries than the other players.
