Pedius

Pedius will eliminate existing communication barriers and inform the community about accessible services to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We will promote the idea that accessibility should not be seen as an obligation, but as an opportunity to offer full services without discrimination and promote equal work.

Pedius has formed successful partnerships with companies that have enabled an accessible call center for deaf customers. Most recently, ENEL has activated work inclusion services for all deaf employees in Italy. Both services emphasize our goal, that a deaf person with the opportunity to be included in everyday life, is able to be their most productive self. 

In the next five years, we aim to grow our user base and community. We wish to reach more companies to render accessible call centers and guarantee work inclusion for deaf employees, offering new opportunties for growth for both individuals and companies themselves.

Pedius breaks down digital barriers to communication by allowing the Deaf to use the phone independently for the various everyday activities and in the workplace.

If Deaf employees are present, a company is held responsible to make the workplace accessible. Despite technology improvements, the use of a regular phone is still a limitation for the Deaf. Yet, within large companies, the use of the phone or conference call runs through most of the business processes, for internal communications or with external partners.

Pedius offers a work inclusion package for Deaf employees that includes a personal number to which they can make and receive phone calls with a specialized notification system and technology that gives the ability to participate in conference calls. The services Pedius offers to companies with Deaf employees promotes inclusion and gives individuals the opportunity to be confident in the work environment and fully participate. Not only can Pedius be used on the smartphone, but also accessed through the web making it available for every business setting.

All Pedius services are driven by the need for accessibility and inclusion in every aspect of life. 

Globally there are about 466 million people who have a 'disabling' hearing loss, that is over 5% of the entire population and this number is expected to continue increasing. The difficulties encountered during their daily private life and communication obstacles on work situations are numerous with high social impact and costs. A lot of services are only accessible by phone and this very often limits the freedom for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. There is also a large communication gap that greatly diminishes chances of accessibility and meaningful inclusion. In addition, a majority of phone communications for the Deaf are provided by human interpreters that require a specialized workforce.

Up until now, different methods of communication have been used for deaf employees. Such as, emails passed along from collegues or the use of an interpreter. With Pedius, the deaf person has the opportunity to be autonomus of their work and private life, just with the addition of the most common communication tool.

Accessibility is now more relevant for large enterprises, but most of the time this relevance doesn't affect their budget. Most of our work today is to prove that an accessible workplace is not only empowering people with disability, but is unleashing new potential and new source of inspiration for all. This should be the rule of the technology, serving the diversity to the people and let them get inspired. 

Pedius allows users to exercise their right to privacy by eliminating the third party interpreter and having the security of a 24/7 service. The objective is not only to supply, but also support the freedom and reliance a smartphone offers to any other person. Phone calls take place in real-time and utilize advanced voice recognition and speech synthesis technologies. Beyond everyday use, Pedius has developed relationships with large companies that make their specific services more accessible for clients. Pedius provides companies with several specific products that guarantee integration and communication, for both their deaf customers and employees. 

Pedius can supply the infrastructure, software, 24/7 customer assistance, and also training course for the operators. Our technology can be easily integrated into any technology and requires no change to exisiting infrastructure, nor extra costs.

To date, there are several channels of communication between deaf and hard of hearing: SMS, MMS, email, DTS, but none of these has an integration with services like the telephone.

The strong competitive advantage of Pedius, compared to call centers that use people as intermediaries of phone calls, lies in low operating costs. Furthermore, the perceived value is very high due to the difficult access to telephone services.
Compared to the foreign context and related Relay Services, Pedius can intervene by reducing call center costs and improving waiting times by creating a hybrid configuration: users will be able to use the automated service without any time limit and without waiting, asking, if necessary, the intervention of an operator.

Technology is the core of our company. Pedius uses advanced voice recognition and speech synthesis technology, the same used by Google and Siri. The technology we use also makes it possible to simultaneously compare the output of multiple voice recognition methods to evaluate the quality of transcriptions obtained and provide the best one. In cases of uncertain transcriptions, the app will notify the user of any alternatives or the user may signal the other party to repeat what they have just said. Pedius is able to optimize our dictionary for specific conversations. For example, if a user were to call a hospital found in the in-app services the probability of technical words is broader than terms used less frequently during medical conversations. Another important point lies within the adoption of Pedius technology. Pedius technology is easy to adopt for partner companies due to the fact there is not necessity to install any hardware or software within the exisiting internal infrastructure, nor the necessity to change any current processes. The operator of a call center can respond to a Pedius call as any other call and speak normally. Infact, Pedius is not only a simple app but a system that has the capability to adapt its functions for certain contexts for larger companies: for example, the implementation of a call center for banking services, Pedius can easily and quickly adapt to any infrastructure.

The service, launched commercially in November 2013, is now widespread in 11 countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Canada, United States, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, and Hong Kong) and, as of today has registered about 25,000 users, supporting 7 languages. 

We have successful partnerships with companies such as: BNL of the Paribas Group, TIM Italia, San Giovanni Hospital, Civil Protection of Rome and other municipalities around Italy, and various other Italian services. With these companies, we have activated accessible call centers all available free for users to call in-app. 

With regards to work inclusion, our first large collaboration is with ENEL who activated work inclusion services for around 40 of their employees throughout Italy and are now working on activating this service in Brazil. 

In the next months (May 2019), we will be working even closer with BNL Bank to activate work inclusion services in Italy. We will be accompanying BNL at the Viva Technology event in Paris, our CEO will be speaking about important initiatives to support and grow work inclusion solutions throughout Europe.

The metrics we use are: number of downloads, number of registered users, number of calls, and the duration of calls. 

Our objectives for the next three years are: to create a hybrid service based on TTS and STT technology with the possibility to call an interpreter remotely, to enable accessible emergency phone calls (currently we are piloting in Italy with our emergency 112 number), and to grow our presence in China.

A risk we face is the legislations obligatory for companies and their CSR initiatives. In some of the countries in which we are present, the Equality laws are enforced stronger than other countries. For this reason, it can be a challenge for us to begin contact with some entities due to the fact that the importance on equality and accessibility are not considered high priority. The responsibility of initiating accessibility and inclusion relies heavily on us at times.

A second risk we face, in some countries, is that some of their Deaf community does not possess writing skills due to the fact that education for this community is not up to standard. This means, there is an exclusive use of Sign Language for this part of the community.

To address our first barrier, it would be ideal that companies do not feel obliged to follow disability legislation, but instead see the true benefits that lie within inclusion. As for our second barrier, Pedius promotes and attends many events focused on the accessibility and inclusion of Deaf inviduals. For this reason, Pedius wants to integrate our TTS/STT technology with a remote Sign Language interpreting service. In essence, creating a hybrid that will allow users to choose the communication method they are most comfortable with.

There are three founders of the organization: Lorenzo Di Ciaccio(CEO), Alessandro Gaeta(Lead Developer), and Stefano La Cesa(CTO). 

The Pedius team consists of 12 people from different continents with diverse, yet complementary skills ranging from technical to commercial and communication. With the addition of new figures from key countries for the development and internationalization of the project, the team is ready to enter new markets and expand its business customer base.

Pedius is based in Rome, Italy. Though our app and services are available in 11 other countries where we are fortunate enough to be active remotely. Our central location has proven a great benefit as it allows us to attend events and gives us the opportunities to physically be present in a country if necessary. 

In the past year, we have been able to begin operations in Brazil and Hong Kong. Both of these countries have a large deaf community, we have been able to reach these communties by interacting with ambassadors in these countries. This not only ensures Pedius is strictly connected to the community, allowing us to create language specific videos and content for our users; but, aids in the development of partnerships between us and country-specific services.

May 2013: Global Social Venture Competition Final, Berkeley

March 2014: Lamarck Award from Confindustria, Smau - Rome
January 2015: First innovative startup with a social vocation
December 2015: BlaBlaCar Positive Disruptive Award winner, Paris
March 2016: European Final winner # 1776Challenge Cup, London
June 2016: Best Social Innovative Startup, Research & Entrepreneurship Foundation, Genoa
June 2016: International Final # 1776Challenge Cup, Washington DC
May 2017: Open Innovation Challenge winner "The car of the Future", LazioInnova
November 2017: Merck for Health winner
December 2017: Top 100 Italian Startup for StartupItalia!
February 2018: Participation in the Zero Project Accessibility conference, Vienna

We leveraged our recognitions to better reach our deaf communties.

As a social enterprise we should prove that solving social issues is also a business. 

After closing in the series A round with $1.5 million, this funding will guarantee our execution of services until we reach our break even amount in the European Market. Pedius is also considering a new venture round to cover expenses for our entrance into Asian market within the next year. 

B2C: Pedius is completely free to download and offers 20 free minutes per month, while premium subscriptions are available for purhcase. 
B2B: Pedius enables traditional call centers to receive phone calls from deaf customers, as well as, work inclusion services for deaf employees. The service has no impact on the companies' infrastructures, pricing is based on the company's size and complexity of integration.

As a Solver, we would like to open ourselves towards new markets and file for patents for our technology. Much of the financing will go towards our efforts to markets where we are already present and wish to grow (for example China and Brazil), taking full advantage of possible partnerships and cooperations to form a solid international community of users and giving Pedius the best advantage in the face of possible competition in the future.