We are a speech technology company building machine learning technology that enables us to generate credible speech that is indistinguishable from real human voices, from text. Our technology is not based on copying existing voices through deepfakes, but on the generation of completely new, not yet existing, human sounding voices.
We distinguish ourselves from other providers of this type of service by giving the speech intent and emotion. With this we can, for example, give advertisements or audio books the same credibility as real recorded speech.
I’m captivated by questions like “How can humans and technology strengthen, augment and improve each other?” and “Will computers ever be able to think, feel, and act just like us?” I enjoy composing music and making pastries in my spare time.
I am Associate Professor Affective Computing at Leiden University, and used to be CTO of Interactive Robotics B.V. I am fascinated by emotion and intelligence, and study this using AI and robots. I love surfing and travelling with my campervan together with my family.
Starting working with Deloitte I graduated as a Certified Public Accountant soon after. I succesfully started my own accounting & auditing firm, focussing on SME’s. I gained extensive experience in the fields of accounting, auditing, tax, finance and valuation, besides from being an entrepreneur.
02.12.2021
Worldwide breakthrough
‘This is a huge breakthrough. Up until now, naturally sounding voices were always deepfake, based on audio data of professional speakers. But deepfakes in text-to-speech for many reasons aren’t usable. One of those reasons is that not everyone wishes to lend out their voice without having control about what is being said with it. With this technology, as the first company in the world, we are able to create new voices that sound like real people,’ Barnier Geerling, CEO of DAISYS explains. ‘In addition,’ Geerling says, ‘this technology makes it easier and faster to apply speech-steered technology. The market potential is enormous, think of audio-visual media using voice-overs, or ‘talking’ cars, robots, or appliances. For manufacturers this means the possibility to integrate realistic speech in their products becomes much easier and more efficient.’
Artificial Intelligence
During the past year and a half, the start-up from Leiden has worked on its technology with a small international team of Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers. ‘We’ve made several important adjustments to the existing basic technology. In addition, we had to cleverly ‘train’ our models, using the right balance of speech data from different speakers. Because of this we’ve managed to generate new, naturally sounding voices that can be real-time adjusted by means of gender, pitch, power and speed.’ Dr.ir Joost Broekens, Chief Technology Officer at DAISYS, explains.
Voice technology; ever more important
The new voice technology is suitable for all online and offline surroundings where the human voice is used, like traditional media, smart devices, games, robots, speech assistants and public announcement systems. Geerling: ‘Credible voice technology is becoming ever more important. Nowadays, everything has a voice: your phone, your car, even your coffee machine. Imagine being able to adjust that voice to your preference. That future is now within reach.’
Listen to an example of our generative voices here. For this sample we just typed in text. No deepfakes were hurt in the making of this.
Contact us via: talktome@daisys.ai
We are always looking for talented people to further develop our technology together. We currently have vacancies for the position(s) of:
• Deep Learning Engineer
• Cloud Engineer
• Audio Engineer
• Linguistic Expert
Do you think DAISYS is the place where you can contribute with your knowledge? Feel free to send us your CV. Please note: we will only contact you if we are interested in talking to you.