Baby cry sounds transmit a great deal of information, including their wants, emotions, well-being, and physical condition. Crying is, in fact, the sole method for newborns to communicate with the outside world. But, do you want to know why they’re crying? Zoundream thinks it can tell.
Zoundream, a Swiss business, analyses and translates newborns’ crying noises using artificial intelligence and sound recognition. The firm applies cutting-edge sound recognition advancements to the specialized field of baby cries.
“Every time a baby cries, they are asking for something,” said Zoundream CEO Roberto Iannone in an interview. According to him, the company’s concept is based on the assumption that “babies cry more or less the same way for the same needs,”
Not only can the technology interpret cries in real-time, but it can also help identify and diagnose probable neonatal diseases and developmental problems and improve the well-being of families and infants all over the world.
Iannone underlined that Zoundream’s technology does not replace good parental judgment. Instead, it acts as a complement to the parent’s abilities.
“Our device is absolutely not made to replace the role of the parents in understanding their own babies,” Iannone said. “It’s actually a way to give them confidence, and to bring more attention to how the baby cries and what they need.”
The company and its algorithms are built on millions of hours of worldwide infant cries examined with spectrograms, a noise measurement technique. Laguna and her colleagues developed a baby cry categorization system based on their vast collection of screaming children noises, categorizing them as hunger, pain, gas, and needing love.
Despite the great diversity of languages spoken worldwide, Laguna discovered that newborn humans all have one common language. While German newborns may sound somewhat different from American babies, all communicate the same identifiable thoughts.
Iannone also emphasized the significance of prosody in babies, which refers to their ability to identify and communicate using tonal phrasings rather than speech. This is instilled in them even before they are born.
By the summer of 2022, Zoundream plans to flood the market. Through pre-existing relationships with businesses, the company wants to make its third-party machine-learning software available throughout Europe and Asia.
“Over the last three years, we’ve been giving free devices [called BabyT] that conduct cry detection and cry translation to whoever wants them,” Iannone said.
“They get it for free, they can keep it for as long as they want, and we keep the data for research purposes.”
Also, The CEO added that “parents love the technology,” So they all like it for different reasons,” he said.
“It adds that reassurance. Because the first months are tough, they’re really tough,” Iannone said, explaining that he can relate very well as he is a father.
