During the Educatech trade show held in November, the EdTech Actu communications team handed the microphone to several players in educational technology, including Benjamin Brousse, CEO of Speechi. He was asked four questions to better understand the position Speechi occupies in the field of technology serving education and the innovations that make it stand out. Read the EdTech Actu article.
🎥 Interview with Benjamin Brousse on EdTech Actu
🎙️ Written transcript of the interview
Can you introduce Speechi?
“We are a French SME based in Lille. We currently have around forty employees, including about twenty engineers. The core of our business is interactive displays for the education and training market. We are mainly present in France, where we are the market leader with a 30% share of the French market. We are also active in around ten international markets: Benelux and Switzerland, where we have a strong presence, Luxembourg, and also Africa.”
© Image taken from the EdTech Actu video interview on the Speechi stand.
“Our main differentiating factor is the user experience. We have chosen to focus most of our investments on a simplified user experience, but in a very concrete way.”
“We have a significant competitive advantage because we know the market very well and today we equip one classroom out of three. So we started from actual needs and asked ourselves how to simplify things today—whether it’s connecting to a screen, sharing files, sharing data, or making teachers’ work easier through a simplified user experience and data sovereignty. Here, you won’t find in any of the other solutions on the market the ability for our customers to choose where their data will be hosted.”
“And the third major differentiating factor is that we are the only French player in this market; all the others are foreign. This means that for our customers—middle schools, high schools, and primary schools—it translates into support delivered in French: French-speaking support, training sessions in French, and more responsive customer service and after-sales support.”
How is the French market doing compared with other countries?
“It is a market that is rather under-equipped. When we compare it with the UK or German markets, which have classroom equipment rates of 80–90%, the French market is around 25–30%. So there is very strong growth potential in the French market, which is also linked to public investment policies, of course. There are the TNE programs you’re familiar with, various investment policies, but it is indeed a market with significant growth potential.”
© Image taken from the EdTech Actu video interview on the Speechi stand.
What innovations are you presenting at the Educatech trade show?
“We started from the observation, together with Speechi’s new technical management, that the market has reached a high level of maturity in terms of hardware. So we made the choice to innovate mainly on the software side, while of course maintaining hardware that is as well suited as possible to market needs.”
“The first point is artificial intelligence, which has been integrated into features designed to support learner inclusion. This includes, in particular, automated translation features in different languages.”
“The second point is the user experience, which has been greatly simplified with Connect software. This is the new application, the new ecosystem that Speechi is launching on the market, and it will truly enable a much simpler user experience.”
“The third main feature, to explain it briefly, is the streaming functionality. In France, one classroom out of three is equipped with a Speechi screen. What we have observed in terms of usage is that video is being used more and more. So we have developed new features that make it possible to divide bandwidth usage by ten, particularly for video sharing, which is increasingly used in terms of interactivity and teaching tools.”
