Talov, accessible technology for everyone.

Across the world, 760 million people with disabilities (470M deaf & 290M blind), face big challenges, no correct access to education and decent work, affecting their INDEPENDENCE.

Less than 5% goes to school, some technical aids can cost up to USD 100K and, according to UN the combined global annual cost of unaddressed deafness & blindness is USD 1400 Billion.

Our solution are two apps, combining the power of AI with the daily use of the smartphone to give people with hearing and visual impairment more independence for their daily life activities. Both apps work in real time, without Internet and in 35 languages:

SpeakLiz for deaf people: understand environment surrounding sounds, human voices, convert sign languages to voice & text.

Vision for blind people: describe by audio their surrounding world, helps in maps navigation, identify objects, distances, money bills of many currencies, read multilingual texts, identify colors, and more.

Across the world, 760 million people with disabilities (470M deaf & 290M blind), face big challenges, no correct access to education and decent work, affecting their INDEPENDENCE.

Less than 5% goes to school, some hearing & visual aids can cost up to USD 100K and the combined global annual cost of unaddressed deafness & blindness is USD 1400 Billion.

Since our technology is already being used in 86 countries, our approach is always global. But specifically for Latin America and the Caribbean, hearing and visual impairment can affect more than 60 million people. In those countries the conditions of respect and correct consideration for people with disabilities, are usually worst than other territories like Europe or North America.

In LatAm region, the disabilities are still associated with poverty, and this has a chain of lack of opportunities since they are child, the cannot have access to correct school, less opportunities to college or universities and even less opportunities to a decent work.

The first step is to visit the federations or associations of people with disabilities, we usually make workshops where they can teach us about their unsolved challenges in daily life.

In the case of deaf people, the urgent needs are around better communication levels with hearing people and understanding what's happening around them in terms of sounds and conversations. In the case of blind people the challenges are related to identify many objects, text reading, and more about their surroundings.

It's usual to have tons of information, and we start classifying the most urgent or high priority. With that new structure we usually start prototyping possible solutions. In this stage it's crucial the help of people with hearing or visual impairment to assist us in the hard & real testing of that prototypes.

The participation of deaf & blind people in this process is a key factor to learn and understand their needs and concerns, and it's usual that many suggestions, corrections and improvements are generated in this stage. 

Once the prototypes are validated by the deaf & blind people, we have better level of fit to their needs and that's how our solutions address them in a better way.

Our apps both have as main technical core, the pattern recognition through artificial intelligence. This task it’s done in offline way, that means that Internet it’s not required to make the inference or pattern recognition, that’s our key differentiator from all of our competitors that always require remote servers to process the pattern recognition task and then send the response to the phone, the problem with this is the latency, and even with lighting fast Internet, always will be a trouble the latency plus the signal strength, or coverage).

First we consider all the urgent needs of the community of people with disabilities to build our own datasets according to that needs. Once collected, that data is processed and labeled to enter neural network structures.

Primarily we use languages like C, Python, for the training process and Swift, Kotlin or Java to mobile deployment. Testing stage it’s done from many perspectives, first comes the performance and technical viability (phone’s battery and resources consumption, etc.), and then comes the main part: testing by real users, people that have hearing or visual impairment are the best judges to determine when an Artificial Intelligence model works and when doesn’t. After their feedback, if there’s a trouble we return to the beginning (dataset quality) and start the process again.

But, when models are working well, it’s time to include them through updates. Models frequently used/planned to use in our apps are:

SpeakLiz (for deaf people): sound patterns recognition, multilingual speech recognition, emotion estimation from speech, sign language movements recognition.

Vision (for blind people): general objects detection, distance estimation, money bills recognition (specific & highly detailed object recognition), GPS pattern recognition to help in maps navigation, color identification, places recognition (contexts prediction).

The output is a huge number of string depending of the model used, and we also use AI to translate each one of these strings to 35 languages, in that way SpeakLiz and Vision can seamlessly perform their digital assistance purpose for many people in many territories. This it’s done thanks to lot of code that help the localization and translation of all the strings in real time, depending of the default phone language, previously chosen by user. 

Our technology's unique selling points are:

• Team composed by great professionals, that having hearing or visual impairment know exactly what their communities need, and these people work with us using their own academic skills and making a high quality  product design & test process.

• Great mixing of a smartphone and the AI power.

• Artificial Intelligence exclusively designed to improve life quality of people with disabilities.

• No-dependence of Internet connection.

• World coverage in 35 languages.

• Adaptive AI that learn every second to improve pattern prediction.

About competitors:

In hearing impairment field our competitors are Ava, MotionSavvy and Live Transcribe (designed by tech giant Google). In visual impairment field our competitors are EnvisionAI and SeeingAI (designed by tech giant Microsoft). 

All of them are great options, but have one common issue, all depend of Internet server connection to make the pattern recognition task, and that means latency even with lightning fast Internet and failure when user go to a zone without signal coverage.

Theory of change

Hypothesis: Technology can provide people with disabilities greater independence and educational / work access.

Needs: 760 million people with disabilities (470 million with hearing impairment and 290 million with visual impairment) cannot have a more independent life.

Inputs/Activities: Sell subscriptions to SpeakLiz and Vision apps.

Products: People with disabilities improve their interaction with the world.

Intermediate Results: Decrease in dependence on sign language interpreters for deaf people and guides for the blind people.

Final Impact: People with disabilities, improve their quality of life, better access to schools and jobs.

Assumptions and risks

Most people do not know sign languages and / or the Braille system.

People with disabilities experience discrimination and therefore have not been able to properly access educational or work circuits.

Sign language interpreters and blind man guides oppose Talov, because they think our technology is going to take their jobs away.

Public / private institutions do very little for real inclusion.

Impact Metrics

Basic metric: Number of people who become recurring subscribers.

Intermediate metric: Better performance in their environments thanks to our technology.

Final metric: Increase in educational and labor insertion of people with disabilities.

In all the world today, the total number of people with hearing impairment is 470 million and 290 million with visual impairment. That is a total of 760 million people. According to International Telecommunications Union (ITU), 30% of them have an smartphone, this number is due to the modern technologies built in modern smartphone are very useful for them, for example they highlight specially voice messages for blind people or video call for deaf people. In that sense, 30% of world's total deaf+blind people, represents 230 million. 

Now we have 2,3 thousand users (0,001% of addressable market).

In one year we'll be reaching 30 thousand users (0,013% of addressable market)

In five years we'll be reaching 0,6 million users (0,26% of addressable market)

Our goals are close related to grow as a startup and being able to offer more and better technology to our public, people with disabilities. We consider will never be enough of actions in the way to build a more inclusive world in terms of discrimination and lack of opportunities for people with disabilities.

That's why as a tech startup, we invest lot of resources in R&D process to continuously improve and prototype new solutions, that are in fit with our users requirements.

That dream apply to all the world, and of course we are now serving to LatAm and Caribbean. We are not focused in just one region, but worldwide.

In one year we plan to serve 30.000 users (0,013% of addressable market) with our technology, and with that volume of operations start our expansion for our five years goal, serving 600.000 users (0,26% of addressable market). Could sound as small percentages, but we are realistic that the most hard challenge it's not selling technology, the most hard is changing general societies mindset towards a real inclusion and non-discrimination. That will take us harder effort in the early years. 

There are some barriers or better called risks, like tech infrastructure availability risks, like the supercomputers required for training the AI models. To mitigate that we are using both online and offline AI training tools to ensure the best training process for the machine learning aspects.

Let's be real, the most of investment industry in concentrated in just making money, there are few organizations trying to make a real change investing in ventures that of course have revenue and profit, but beyond that causes a highly positive impact in life of people. 

But still those investment heroes are a few compared with traditional ones, the main barrier is to change mindset of investors to find better financial opportunities to entrepreneurs, and for general societies to have the will of increasing the demand of this kind of technologies driven by a sincere desire of including people with disabilities to the schools, jobs, etc.

Doing entrepreneurship in this field, it's by itself a barrier to overcome because of the previously explained reasons. About the tech infrastructure barriers or risks we are always looking for backup algorithms and cloud & offline computing options to be independent of just one provider.

The financial barrier is always big, specially when you try to make a global product/service from LatAm, and more even specially from our country Ecuador.

So we are overcoming the lack of interest and support of public & private organizations since the beginning, going global beyond our country and region boundaries to reach another territories where the concept of respect to people with disabilities could be probably better and wider understood by public & private organizations.

Participating in startup challenges and accelerators also have helped us to overcome some hard times, so usual in the first stage of a startup. That resources have been useful to improve our computing capacity (online & offline), hire talented people in many fields so important to grow (from AI to webmasters and general counsels/advisors). 

As I told before, our digital activities (Internet calls with associations, federations of people with disabilities) have a  worldwide span, not just Latin America/Caribbean.

What we do more in our region is to have direct physical contact with our geographically closest users to know how's everything going and receive their feedback directly when they are using our apps. That's very important for the prototyping process of new solutions, or improving the existing ones.

Also with the local associations we search for the most critical cases of lack of money to access our technology, and we provide them with free access forever to our tech. That's hard to do when you are building a startup in terms of revenue, but we feel it's our contribution to our community.

Despite having users in most of the Latin America/Caribbean countries, we need to increase that number in each territory. Our expansion plans need resources first to make a highly intensive niche marketing for people with disabilities and our target community in each country, in each language. That requires to hire people specialist in that field. Until today everything have been done (from cleaning the office going through webmaster tasks, to develop the artificial intelligence algorithms, etc.), by co-founders, and later by the other 3 team members.

So we think that a further expansion stage strongly needs a team expansion in key areas to be each one more focused in their critical tasks.

Speaking about the market opportunity in numbers, we know that approximately 65 million people have hearing or visual impairment in any stage in the Latin America/Caribbean region. According to ITU (International Telecommunications Union), 30% of that number have access to an smartphone, this number is due to the modern technologies built in today smartphones that are very useful for them, for example they highlight specially voice messages for blind people or video call for deaf people.

We are speaking of an addressable market of almost 20 million of people, in financial terms (considering everyone as monthly subscriber of our technology), this means monthly operations for USD 97 million. We want to take the 0,6% of that LatAm market in five years (120.000 Latin American and Caribbean users).

No other selection.

We work 5 people as full-time staff. Additionally, we receive an average of 5 students from Universities to make research with us.

Hugo Jácome, Co-founder & President: Classical Musician, Acoustics Engineer and MBA. Leads worldwide marketing, PR, Digital Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence models development.

Carlos Obando, Co-founder & CEO: Sportsman, Mechatronics Engineer and ICT Postgraduate. Leads mobile software development and technology deployment.  

Diana Cerón, Communications: Diana has a total visual impairment since she was born, in charge of General Communications and community managment. Research, development and validation of technology for people with visual impairment.

Erick Ponce, Corporate Identity: Erik has a total hearing impairment since he was born, in charge of Corporate Identity and Image of webpage. Research, development and validation of technology for people with hearing impairment.

Gustavo Jácome, General Counseling: Experienced Entrepreneur. General Counsel and Legal Affairs, Investor.

The team is expert in artificial intelligence, software development and accessibility. All this knowledge combined is a powerful way to research and develop new products/services for people with disabilities. The most important fact is the full team commitment to work towards a real inclusion, and technology is one of our tools for achieve that dream.

Now, we are working now with:

• IBM (USA): Cloud computing services, we were selected as premium startup and have access to many of their cloud computing technology.

• Google (LatAm): We are part of Google and we have access to their technology since winning the ecuadorian edition of Google Developers Launchpad.

• IMPAQTO (Ecuador): Our partners in terms of entrepreneurship, PR.

• Seedstars (Switzerland): The world’s biggest net of entrepreneurship for emerging markets.

• MADA (Qatar): Research center for Accessibility and technology.

• National Federation of deaf people (Ecuador): We frequently collaborate with them in terms of researching new features and improvements, for hearing impairment and providing them with free access to our technology.

• National Federation of blind people (Ecuador): We frequently collaborate with them in terms of researching new features and improvements for visual impairment, and providing them with free access to our technology.

Our business model is very simple, we reach our users directly through two distribution channels: App Store and Play Store, our revenue streams from are the subscription plans we offer:

- Monthly: USD 4,99

- Annual: USD 39,99

- Lifetime: USD 149,99

We expect our sales can cover our expenses in the short term, mainly because now we have a heavy bank debt that was useful to sustain all the R&D process even without an MVP, that's usual in tech companies, lot of research without results and with no income.

We expect also to win any startup contest or have access to seed capital, to strengthen our current efforts to obtain revenue with existing subscribers (in general this means improve the app to retain them) and invest in new technologies and effective marketing strategies to gain new subscribers and increase our sales.

The main barrier TPrize can help us to overcome it's a funding to grow our team and accelerate our processes of improving our technology and developing new tools and features for our users, and of course to increase our revenue streams to make it sustainable. We consider TPrize will be useful in specific goals:

15% to strength our today's mission of giving free access to our technology by issuing free lifetime licenses to the cases of people that cannot afford, in coordination with national and international disability agencies that have accurate data of the people really worthy of that benefit.

50% to improve our Artificial Intelligence capacities (tech devices, cloud services and talented people hiring), that will boost usefulness for the subscriptors and means better sales numbers because of products improvements.

35% to increase sales by improving multilingual digital marketing strategies for this special niche, specially directed to the app store search behavior of people with disabilities and their beloved.

No other selection.

Tech & cloud computing giants and their teams to expand in a huge way our technological capacity.

Media and awareness specialists for this niche marketing segment, people with disabilities. 

International sales agents that generate local awareness and sales in far territories from us.

Funds providing capital for specific tech for disabilities.