Fonetti debuts in London

Clare Balding introduces Fonetti at a reception held at the IOD in Pall Mall.

What a week we’ve had here at Fonetti HQ!

Not only does today mark a whole 7 days of our app being approved by the Department for Education – but Wednesday night saw our Fonetti Showcase at the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall, marking our full public launch.

And what an evening it was! Our Brand Ambassador, Clare Balding OBE, kicked off the evening by welcoming all of our fabulous guests and introducing our co-founder and CEO, Kim Antoniou. Kim gave us a brilliant speech (with a little bit of help from our CCO, Colin Tankard keeping the slide-show going smoothly). Great job there, Colin.

Kim spoke about the back story and how a chance conversation between her and co-founder Bil Bungay 7 years ago  which started with “my 2 year old grandson knows how to use a smartphone even though he still cannot string a full sentence together” ended up with “Lets build a listening Bookshop for children to practice their reading on”  (Little did they know at the time that they would actually have to develop the technology to support the idea!)

They went on to talk about the past, present, and future of EdTech and how what we have developed had the potential to transform they way that the tech enthusiastic kids amongst us practice reading.

Then we heard from the world class Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) expert Dr. Peter Bell of Edinburgh Universities renowned School of Informatics who is the brains behind our unique voice recognition engine, and it’s fair to say a few minds were blown… Our technical lead Lee Sherwood and Colin took some questions about the possibilities of Fonetti and the ASR engine.

Finally, we heard again from Clare, Kim, and Colin. “I’m glad to be a part of something that is going to change the world,” said Clare.

After all the talking, we were all absolutely spoilt with drinks and canapes!

We’d also love to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who has downloaded Fonetti over the last week. We hope you’re enjoying our Listening Books!

And don’t forget, our ears are wide open for feedback. Just send an email to us on info@fonetti.com

Get in touch!

Thanks for stopping by! If you would like to find out any more information about Fonetti, or even who we are as a team, please do get in touch.

We are always happy to speak with our users, and look forward to hearing from you sometime.