Auris Tech, founded by Competition Jury member Kim Antoniou, was ranked first inBusinessCloud’s EdTech 50 ranking of innovative UK education technology companies. The result was announced on 25 March 2022 following the creation of a 99-companyshortlist. According to Auris Tech, the final ranking combined the assessment of anindependent judging panel with the results of a public vote involving approximately 1,000participants. Auris Tech is the company behind Fonetti, a reading platform developed around automaticspeech recognition technology. The company’s work addresses a particular technological challenge: recognising the waychildren read aloud. Reading speech differs from ordinary conversational speech. Children may pause, repeatwords, return to an earlier part of a sentence or skip unfamiliar words. Speech-recognitiontechnology designed for general conversation may therefore have difficulty accuratelyfollowing a child’s reading. Auris Tech developed its technology around these specific characteristics, allowing itsplatform to follow spoken reading and support literacy development. Recognition in the EdTech 50 highlighted the wider potential of specialised technologydeveloped for a clearly defined educational problem. It also illustrates an important characteristic of innovation: successful technology does notnecessarily depend on creating the broadest possible application. In many cases, significantinnovation comes from understanding a specific user group and designing technology aroundits particular requirements. For education technology, this means combining technical development with anunderstanding of how teachers and students actually use the product. The 2022 recognition represented another stage in the development of Auris Tech and itswork in applying speech-recognition technology to children’s literacy. Kim Antoniou is Founder and CEO of Auris Tech and serves on the Competition Jury of theAssociation of Certified Professionals in Innovation & Invention.