Symbl.ai first sponsored TADHack in 2020 at TADHack North America, and in 2021 they sponsored TADHack Global. TADHack is the largest global hackathon focused on programmable communications since 2014.
In 2021 Symbl.ai achieved an amazing result, 21 hacks built with their resources; all created over one weekend by developers from around the world. The last time we saw such a large number of hacks for one sponsor was when TADHack had 3000+ registrations in 2017/2018. And last year was during a pandemic!
This article reviews some of the excellent hacks created on Symbl.ai to show how powerful and easy they’ve made conversation intelligence for developers. If you have access to video or voice conversation data, Symbl.ai APIs and SDKs can be a no-brainer to get highly accurate transcriptions and generate contextual understanding and structure from conversations for summarization, topics, action items, questions, intents and more. All in real-time, powered by Machine Learning.
The winner of TADHack South Africa in 2021 was Maftuha by mother and son team Adela Bootha and Talhah Patelia.
Due to Covid19, schools and universities were forced to move to online learning overnight. There are a multitude of platforms being used for online examinations, classes, information and communication between teachers and students. There are challenges around students cheating in online exams with additional monitors attached to their PCs, while some students are known to pay their friends to write their exams. This is due to a lack of student identification and monitoring of students during online exams.
Maftuha used Symbl.ai in the chat function for communication between students-teachers, student-student and teacher-teacher. This facility uses sentiment analysis across all communications to see for example if students are stressed, but also for inappropriate student-student communications. Talhah and Adela have this to say about their Symbl.ai experience, “Once we started experimenting with Symbl.ai’s API we were able to quickly add sentiment analysis that greatly extended what was possible with our hack.”
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been available for many years; however, it’s generally been limited to specialized applications. Symbl.ai now makes it easy to add accurate ASR into many applications, along with neat features such as speaker detection, summarization, topics, action items, etc. ASR has been democratized for everyone.
Podcast Annotator, by team Similarly Geeky (Lily Madar and Steven Goodwin) at TADHack UK, provides hands-free note taking while listening to a podcast. For example, when walking or running. As you listen to the podcast, you can say things like “good point” and “I must look that up.” These phrases are transcribed and added to a timeline for later review. Future improvements include using the Symbl.ai API automatic topic extraction.
“What we liked about Symbl.ai was how easy it was to “plug-and-play” on the day of the hack.” Said Lily and Steven.
Notify, by Solange Ormeno, Massi Escano, Haritha Diraneyya, German Gamboa, Mike Groff, Hunter Henry at TADHack Orlando / North America. Is a virtual assistant for annotating meetings. The hack uses Symbl.ai to write a transcription for the call as well as capture the meeting topic.
In some meetings 50% of the attendees do not contribute. Often because they are listening in to represent another group in the organization. Why take 30-45 minutes out of your day when you can review the meeting in less than 5 minutes? Especially if the notes highlight any relevant topics for your attention.
“Once we realized Symbl.ai gave us topics, action items, summaries and more; our vision of Notify became a reality over one weekend. Symbl.ai is fantastic!” Shared Hunter Henry.
RescueR by Ebtesam Al Haque, Doug Moore, Amy Sliwinski, Muntaser Syed, Vincent Tang, Davindra Tulsi, Chris Woodle at TADHack Orlando / North America. On July 26th, 2021, there was a building in Miami that collapsed. Some residents were caught in the debris and didn’t make it.
Others were trapped and needed help ASAP. This is when the search and rescue operation began. First responders need to dig out potential victims. But where do they dig? And will digging in the wrong spot cause collateral elsewhere? Therefore, the team created an autonomous search and rescue bot, RescueR.
Unlike a human, RescueR is tiny and can navigate crevices and debris. The role Symbl.ai played in this massive hack was real-time transcription. To assist in real-time language translations, and in data analysis after the event.
“The ease of use, the 30 languages supported, and all the data analysis enabled us to rapidly implement Symbl.ai in our over-ambitious hack.” Stated Muntaser Syed.
And let’s not forget the impressive hacks built on Symbl.ai from 2020. Homework Helper by Mike and Elias Cairns (father and son team) at TADHack North America. There were 2 functions: Lecture Helper makes it easier for parents to help children with homework during COVID-19; while Grade Helper assists parents in monitoring children’s grades. Lecture Helper transcribed one of Elias’s actual math classes using Symbl.ai.
“I’ve worked in telecoms for many decades, and Symbl.ai has made ASR accurate and easy to use, this will revolutionize many industries.” Shared Mike Cairns.
WebRTC Ventures hack ‘CPaaS as a Secretary’ from Muhammad Hamza Nasir and Justin Williams at TADHack North America. A solution for a more organized and efficient way to handle missed calls when you’re away using AI. Unanswered calls are automatically answered by a bot which can scribe the message and any action points using Symbl.ai.
“Symbl.ai was very easy to use, it’s an intuitive API. No training was required, so we were able to start hacking immediately.” Said Muhammad Hamza Nasir.
These are all great testimony to the developer-first approach taken by Symbl.ai in democratizing conversation intelligence for everyone. We cannot wait to see what happens at TADHack Global 2022.
About Alan Quayle
Alan Quayle is the founder of TADHack, the largest global hackathon focused on programmable communications, and TADSummit, a series of events focused on programmable communications. His leadership in programmable telecoms is democratizing the telecoms industry, so anyone can use it to solve problems that matter to them. Check out his thoughts here: Alan Quayle blog, TADHack blog, TADSummit blog, and on Twitter @Alan_Quayle, @TADHack, and @TADSummit.
