Hello, and welcome, everybody. Guys, it is getting close to
Christmas. This is Joe from Sudapri. Io, and therefore, I'm bringing
you a very special bonus episode this week
to you very shortly before Christmas. But nonetheless, I would
like to welcome Daniel here. Hey. How are you doing?
Hey, Jan. I'm doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
AI pleasure. We may tell our audience that this, recording
is sponsored by Frankfurt, meaning the business development
agency who is also supporting Frankfurt Forward. And
the reason you are here, you guys won start up of the
year 2024. Congratulations
to that. Did
this recognition first, can
you tell us a little bit about you and your company
before we get into the specific questions? Yeah.
Sure. Yeah. So
Daniel Iglesias is my name. I am from the AI Main
region. I AI married to teacher. My
professional background is in banking technology consulting.
That's what I did before I founded,
Digisapiens in, 2020.
And, what we do at Digi DigiZapiens is
we produce speech recognition systems
that not just recognize what is being
said, rather how it's being said. So
it's a speech recognition system that is geared towards
special use cases, that
are relevant to measure how well somebody speaks or
reads. And with the help of this speech
recognition technology that, is AI,
so that we've built ourselves, you can build
use cases in especially in the area of
education. So that's where we started. And the first use
case that was built with our speech recognition technology
was the LALI 2. LALI 2
stands for loud laser tutor in German, which is,
reading aloud tutors. So it's it's a tool,
that listens to students in schools
from 2nd to 7th grade in Germany.
While they read aloud, it analyzes how
well they do that, so it carries out a diagnosis.
And after that diagnosis, they are,
being trained to become better readers
based on the, diagnosis that was carried out before
that. So basically, AI looking for a question here. Sure.
When you said they are your tool
helps, how well they are speaking
their AI the tone of voice recognition. Is it only
how well they vocalize the tones? Or is
it also that you can deduce some some
level of their understanding of what they're reading?
The speech recognition technology itself is,
audio technology, so it listens. So we it detects everything
that can be caught by a microphone.
And, in contrast to, I
call it, regular speech recognition systems where the goal is to
detect the probable intent. So what would
be this what are you probably meaning? So,
the goal is to carry out a a
task or, AI I'm
looking, a command. You have to carry out a command. Mhmm. Yeah.
Play this and that song or whatever. In contrast to
that, we really transcribe and list listen to what has
actually been said. So this includes
arrows AI my that I already said now a few
times. And repetitions, or
text so regarding text repetitions, things that have
been left out or added, the tonality
of things, and also whether you pronounce words
correctly. Yeah. So that's what the, speech
recognition technology does. But we also develop,
systems that help understand help
students understand the text better by
generating,
differentiated quizzes. So, you cannot ask
every reader the same question. It must be adapted to
his reading level and also understanding
capabilities. So the complexity of the questions
and the possible answers also must be adapted. So,
all in all, we're in the business of providing
education, specialists, with,
with the necessary tools to build very innovative
adaptive tools, for learning
reading skills or language
skills? That is exactly what I had in mind.
Vividly remember when, for the first time
in my life, I understood a Chinese joke
about foreigners, instead of how
how, she said, how how. So the the 1 means
good good, the other means mouse mouse, different tones. So the the
the the question is here, how
many languages can you do? And isn't something like
Chinese where there's a different if I ask or
the 1 we means please ask. So if you ask for direction,
the other one's the other 1 means please kiss. Well, I made
an older Chinese lady on the streets of Beijing really blush.
How many of those differences could you actually do?
Because on the top of my mind, yes, of course, English is a little bit
difficult to pronounce Spanish as well. But if the tone really makes a
difference, like in languages, like Chinese, Cantonese, and so on and so forth,
that would weigh your AI way 2 would really come
in handy. So my question would be, how
much can you do there? Could you, give us an
idea of the granularity and languages you cover? Yes.
We so as of now, we're covering German and English.
We did not experiment with Chinese since the
Chinese education technology market is highly regulated
and basically close towards foreigners.
But, we my team, I have
dedicated experts in,
working with non Roman
languages, so especially also Indian languages.
There's 40 something. Sorry that I cannot recall
the exact number, but there's, more than 40
languages, official languages spoken in India. We can work with
those. We can also work with, Arabic
character sets. But as of now, in terms of
solutions that are at hand, we can work with
Germany, German language, and, we
or next year, we will also launch, the English version
AI API, and other languages.
We have the skills and capabilities to train and
fine tune models, with a short pilot
project that we need to carry out with potential customers.
So that means you already, by the way, I linked it in the show
notes. La Lalu. Who is it?
La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la
la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la
la la. It's There's a there's a, a
song that you sing to children before they go to bed,
AI. It's called. Yeah?
And, we have some similarities there. So it's called
too. It's about 3. Mhmm.
So, sorry. Just
typing here, that we also linked the
song here, in the show notes. My my quest
so this already establishes something we
could deduce from what you're saying. So, basically, you are
not a customer facing product. You're 1 of the tools, the APIs,
others could include, could work with in
developing their own client facing b to b, b to c, b to
g tools. Right? Yes.
With the asterisk, we we have
developed the LALI 2, for our partner at hence,
So we do develop platforms and applications,
but we rather license our the speech technology
to partners, b to b, b to g, b to c, whatever.
We are already discussing, the tool. But
before that, I I actually wanted to be because I have so
many questions. Before that, I would actually, wanted
to ask you
where this idea is coming from. I do believe I have an idea since you're
married to your teacher, but you have been working in banking,
finance, technology, triangle consulting. So
so, where did the idea come from? How did you get
that? And especially the question, when did you decide
jump ship to really do this full time?
Okay. So I was, like you said, I
was about 17 or 18 years into banking technology,
and, I always had the goal
to promote young people
in achieving, how do you call
it, higher education. Let's put it this way, to
get the most out of their potential. So I did,
trainings in schools for how to apply to a job,
how do I choose the right job for me, etcetera etcetera. And
I always had this passion for helping young people.
So, that's that that passion was always there. But in
2019, that was the time where I really,
thought about what can I do with the skills that I have and the
knowledge that I have? And, to to really have an
impact on our youth in a bigger scale. Because
this is the AI, shortly after AI became a father of
a of a daughter, and I have observed
certain trends in our society in Germany. 40 to
50% of the children have
background, with non German parents or migration
background, as you would call it in Germany. And this
leads to some hurdles and
some difficulties, in,
in the school system, and and and since
we also, at the same time, have a shortage of
shortage of teachers. And I have also
observed what happens in the market regarding
the upcoming AI of AI, robotics, automation.
I was part of it in banking. So I added
the deterioration of reading skills
towards higher requirements
regarding job skills and came up,
with, with a
perspective that I didn't like for the future of my children. So that's
why I decided to take my skills,
which is general management, business
development, technology understanding skills, and
work together with the best experts I can find,
in terms of reading capabilities
and, reading training and,
excellent techno technology experts bring those things together and
build what you find today.
Mhmm. The tone of voice recognition
is fascinating. You already told
us the, loud reading tutor is
something you develop for a customer. Could you also
share another example already where an external,
client is using your tool? The
second example is in the making. It's not ready to be
shared publicly, but, I must openly say the
past was, highly,
we were highly invested into building
that tool, which is 1 of a kind. It took a lot of
attention and all of our resources to get it running in
time and, make it
scalable and stable and user friendly. So
now that the product is fully marketable and
most of the almost all bugs are fixed, yeah,
now we are able and ready to focus in on
new, projects and partners.
AI see. Talked about
partners here and winning new clients. Winning the Frankfurt Forward award
is a huge accomplishment. What do you think made DigiSapiens
stand out among the competition this year?
AI think it's the social impact,
dimension of what we're doing. We are for profit social enterprise,
so we are here to do good
and, earn some money at the same time. And I think the audience
AI that idea, and I think there's a lot of ad
techs out there, but pulling it off in the way
that we did, by partnering with such a,
renowned brand AI Ernst Kedfalak,
as a first initial project. And at the same time,
building such a unique technology like we do.
I think that's what impressed the jury and,
caused a lot of, support in the audience.
I see. I see. Your
technology has potential across industries.
We already know you're working and focused
on the education, but could you also see some other
industries where you could, like, in the future, a few years down the road,
apply it?
Yes. Outside of, education,
there is also the entertainment and gaming industry
that could work with our technology,
where you could you could use it to build games that,
based on reading skills, which would
be some sort of, yeah, educational games at at the same
time, but you can also use it to,
to build, how do you call it?
A a presentation trainer or speech trainer that,
helps you become a better speaker for public speeches.
The creativity and opportunities are unlimited,
but everything that involves the ability
to carefully listen to what and how things are
being said. You know? Mhmm.
I AI was wondering, AI sure you
thought a lot about potential use cases. Could you share, like,
the the the the the the most interesting, the most,
quirky 1 you already came up with?
No no need that it actually AI, but you thought,
theoretically, our idea could also be applied too.
Yes. So we have applied it to reading
learning or reading promotion, but, very,
very relevant use cases also in the area
of language learning. You have seen
big companies like Bubble, etcetera use it in
some way. Yeah. And we envision
other ways that are much more focused on
dialogues, that our technology could be
used for to promote language skills or learn a new
language. So we are able to evaluate how
things are being pronounced. That's 1 major skill. We can
analyze, literally what has been said.
We can analyze 4 ds, all areas
of, language that we can analyze.
And I think this is relevant if you want to learn a language
properly. You have, you have given some example from
Chinese. If you listen to people
talking German with all their accents and
dialects, we also have ways to
tackle, dialect,
dialects because the way you use your mouth, your
tongue, your teeth. So your
complete speech apparatus is also something that we can
derive from the audio signal and combining all
those, all those measurements
into a cohesive didactical
concept is something really unique,
that we haven't seen so far. Mhmm.
Going into a little bit different topic because every everybody talks
about accuracy, like fantasizing AI and
ethical use of AI. With analyzing of tones, you're
you're, collecting potentially
sensitive information or your clients do and you process
this. How do you, ensure
the ethical use and the accuracy when handling the sensitive
data? Yeah. So
the in Germany, it's always a relevant question whether it's a
personal personality AI identity related data.
You know? That's 1 major question. And,
the the thing is, if voice
really is such data, you would
need to have some registry
of confirmed identities
that are linked to a voice profile or voice biometrics profile
to to pose some danger
to a data leak or whatever. You know? Mhmm.
And this is not the case and will never be the case. We will
I well, let's let's not say it will never be the case. I don't know
what happens in, the year 21 100. But as of now, we don't
have a voice register, a public 1.
And, the question is also, even if this existed
on a government level, the question is also, do
companies, do other individuals,
criminals have access to this registry, and can they use it to harm
you? And the I don't I don't see
that. When you ask me about ethics
in my context, we regard the topic of
ethics in terms of accessibility to
our solutions. So can somebody from Bavaria
use it, as the same way as somebody from
Saxony can use it? And can somebody
with Turkish or Arab
accent use it AI somebody from, Hanover
without any accent? And the answer is yes.
So we AI to and we put a lot of
effort into avoiding any biases
in our speech recognition system by
training it very profoundly
with different accents and dialects
to make sure that it works with every
user. Yeah. So that's how we look at that.
So you you you put a lot of effort into that,
making it possible for everybody to understand. We may tell the
audience that there are some people who speak very, hefty,
local accents, not only from Bavaria, but AI,
Thales, Saxony, and so on and so forth, but also Platych
in the very north. It's really hard for you to understand when you're from a
different area. Many Americans will understand,
will, have an idea when I talk about somebody with a very
heavy southern draw or something that's also hard to understand. So
you took care to cover all those
peoples and not disqualify somebody there. So I do believe there
was a lot of development work going into.
What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome this in
developing digital DigiSapiens, not digital.
DigiSapiens. Sorry. Yes. So
yeah. There there were a lot. So which 1 can I
yeah? So we started as a company that wanted
to provide speech recognition systems only,
And then we were suddenly in the position to develop a whole
platform. So in a short time, we had to
set up a team that was able to do that, build a
product team or, UX and
front end development team around our core technology
team in a very short time and,
build a product that fulfills high
expectations. And this, was a
real challenge. To be honest, we,
like a lot of other startups, were
in the forced to publish a product a
year ago that was not perfect, far from perfect.
So we got that feedback in the beginning, but we worked
really, really hard,
with our team, which also includes the first level
support who's directly in contact with us, our schools,
that use it and the partners to really get the first
hand impression of what is
working well and whatnot, and they are
very much integrated into our development process.
And we take we took every feedback very
seriously. And, yeah, now a
year after we've launched, I am confident to say that
we have a very unique, innovative, and highly
effective, reading promotion solution
that is, yeah, that we can
be really proud of. I see.
The AI world is developing pretty rapidly. You
are right now, I would say, on the cutting edge of development.
How do you make sure that you remain
there as 1 of the top solutions keeping up with the with
the AI developments? We
thanks, for that feedback. Yeah. And we and
I, we really work hard to be seen this
way. So what we do is we invest a lot a
lot into r and d. Most of our money goes into r and
d. We publish papers. We participate
in international conferences, where we
also do take over
tasks and compete against other teams
in optimizing models, quantifying models, and
raising accuracy. And we always, come
up on top, also, leaving
huge names behind us. So we,
we regard this as a sport to develop
new methods, overcome,
overcome hurdles
and, yeah, really try to be on the cutting or beating edge
when it comes to sophisticated speech recognition
and NLP solutions. Yes.
Daniel, I'm sure there will be questions on
where are the papers. I do have a few suspects where you mentioned something like
this. You will give me after the official end of the
interview, you will give me, the link, and I'll post it in the show
notes. I do have a few certain suspects that always request something
like this. Yes, Claude from Paris. I'm looking at you. Exactly.
And then they they can dig through it. So,
let us go into the very last part of the
interview because I'm now already bothering you for, like,
almost 40 minutes in this online meeting and,
more than 25 minutes in actual interview. So,
don't worry. There there are only a few more questions left.
I was wondering winning an award like Frankfurt Forward often
reflects strong local support. How has the
Frankfurt ecosystem contributed to your journey so far?
There are a lot.
So the our ecosystem is
very regional. Our investor is regional. Our
network helped us find our first customer,
is from the region. I we get a lot of
recognition and inquiries due to that, price.
So, it's mostly visibility
and also recognition. So it's when you approach somebody
and, he asks you who you are, what you do, and,
you mentioned the start up of the year world from Frankfurt forward,
especially in the region. Everybody stops questioning
whether you are or whether what you are doing is
sound and makes sense. So,
the intro and entrees into conversation building partnerships
is much easier. Mhmm. And
now only 3 more questions left.
You are AI now a leader in a very specialized niche in
AI. But what advice would you offer to other start ups
looking to innovate in the AI and tech space? Some kind
of skills, like processes you have learned so far,
not only taking the, your business ideas from influencers
on Instagram. Yeah.
I don't know if I'm the right 1 to give advice. Yeah. I'm not,
the tech guy in my company. But what I would generally suggest, when
looking at tech is not looking at a hype or the technology,
but rather trying to solve real world problems.
So AI in Germany, we have 25% of the children,
that at the age of 15 do not understand what they
read, and they don't understand what they read because they are not fluent
in reading. So that's a huge societal
problem, and that's, that was the initial thing
that led me to found it found DigiZapiens.
And I would really not focus on the
technology or the AI for the purpose of the technology in
AI, but rather using tech as a
means to solve a real problem. Yeah. And if it takes
AI, it's fine. If not, not.
But 1 also has to say in German, there can
be very difficult,
sentences and structures. III
everybody who's who tried either in German or in a
translated version to read Kafka should know what we're
talking about here. So, therefore, it
can be difficult. There's a saying in German,
German language, difficult language. So, actually,
it it it says good things about you guys that you started
with the German language and mastered it for your, for
your, tool, DigiSapiens.
We usually close out with 2 more questions, and they're usually
pretty simple and usually end with a yes. But I'll ask them
anyway. Are you open to talk to new investors?
And as always, I'll link your LinkedIn profile down here in the show
notes wherever you're looking this wherever you're watching this. No.
Sorry. This AI, no watching. But,
anyways, you you either directly in your tool. I'm
sorry. Not every tool allows links you can then click.
So, basically, you could go to our blog, standard break.
Ioforward/block, and there we link Daniel's
profile. Plus, when you are
expanding, when you're growing as a young company, I am sure you're
all so open to have applications from potential new
employees. Right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. We're
looking for we're looking for good people always.
AI, is there a career website that I could launch,
or should the people simply, that I could link, or should the
people, simply reach out to you via email?
Yeah. The latter. Directly reach out to us. We,
we could, we we have a way to go regarding an
HR department, so everything's handled by the team, depending
on the competency somebody's applying for. So
can't use the public channels or directly contact me, and I will forward
it to the colleagues. Again, go to the blog to the LinkedIn
profile. Guys, it was a
pleasure talking to you, Daniel. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for
answering more than 30 minutes difficult questions here and,
keeping up my stupid interjection interruptions. Thank you very
much. Thank you. Nice being here.
Yeah. So and yeah. Thanks for having me here, and, yeah,
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to everyone.
Thank you. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year from you as well.
Thank you, guys. Bye bye.