NEW MEANING TO MARK MY WORDS
Dubai student wins competition with gadget that uses artificial intelligence to help you get the most out of speeches
Dubai student wins competition with Google-like app for speech,
DUBAI // A young entrepreneur has won first prize at a competition for inventors with his idea for a “Google” for speech.
Rishav Jalan, a student at Bits Pilani University in Dubai, impressed judges at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards competition in the UAE with his Wrappup voice recording app.
The inspiration for the idea came from Mr Jalan’s time at a management consulting company, where he took part in many meetings.
“Suddenly, the chief executive said something important, and everyone’s head dived into their notebook as they struggled to take down what he said while listening for more information,” said the 22-year-old Indian.
At that moment, he realised everyone was duplicating the same effort to capture a moment that already happened.
“Wrappup is a smart voice recording platform that uses AI (artificial intelligence) to transform speech into useful business data.”
It has a database of words that are most used on the internet and will highlight words that are unique or rarely used.
As well as this, Wrappup is also capable of detecting important moments in conversations. “It recognises clusters of important activity and moments for the user, creating playable bite-sized notes from the discussion,” said Mr Jalan.
“Users can then share and reference these playable minutes as needed. Whether recorded through the mobile app, web conferencing, or VOIP calling, it leverages speech technology to create more efficient and productive communications in the workplace.” With the UAE competition prize under his belt, Mr Jalan will head to Frankfurt, Germany in April for the global finals where he will be competing against 50 others for a share of $400,000 (Dh1.5m) in prizes. He has already won $ 3,000 worth of Aramex shipping aid for his business, and the GCC Harvard Business School Club will mentor him until the finals in Frankfurt. Looking to the future, Mr Jalan is planning to fully automate the process of taking minutes during meetings by creating an AI “secretary”.
“The idea is to take the most valuable information and make it useful wherever there is communication between people – whether it’s at a meeting, classroom or a conference,” he said.
“Finally, through wearables like the Google Glass and Snapchat Spectacles, Wrappup could move from a secretary for your meetings to a personal assistant for your brain. The possibilities are endless.”
Ashish Panjabi, UAE chairman for Entrepreneur’s Organisation, which organises the GSEA competition, was impressed with all the entries.
“Rishav’s business has already got its first round of funding which has meant he has had to learn a lot very quickly and his thirst for learning was very clear as he did bring this up during presentation,” he said. “He was also very humble about his accomplishments.” Organisers hope to expand the competition format for next year. “We hope to have qualifier competitions in the UAE before we get into the national finals,” said Mr Panjabi.
“These qualifier competitions could be spread across the country.”
For more details visit www. gsea.org