Pedius Education - Real-time captioned lectures

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led the world school system to be faced with a major challenge: to radically change the way school is done and how students and teachers interact. This challenge especially affected some students, namely those with deafness or with communication and learning difficulties, who suddenly found themselves interfacing with an online system and teachers unable to handle it.

Even before COVID, these young students were often excluded from most classes for reasons such as poorly equipped classrooms and lack of technological aids and/or effective and inclusive communication tools, thus going to affect not only their learning but also their communication and social processes.

To date, only 3 percent of the deaf population manages to obtain a college degree, while the European average is about 27 percent, showing that it is 10 times more difficult for a deaf student to achieve a high level of education. Profound deafness (minimum hearing threshold above 90dB) is a condition that affects an average of one in a thousand people; causes are mainly genetic or due to viral infections in childhood before language acquisition. In Italy there are more than 70000 deaf people (source Ente Nazionale Sordi), while worldwide the number is about 70 million (source World Deaf Foundation). Specifically, deaf students in Italy are 1.8 %, while in America it is 1.3% of those attending college who suffer from deafness or hearing problems. On the other hand, as for learning disorders, particularly ADHD, dyslexia and dysgraphia, here the numbers are higher. To give some examples, in Italy 3.2 % of students have learning disorders, with regional differences and a peak of 4.8% in northern Italy; in India the number rises to 8%; while in the United States it reaches 20%. (Sources: National Board of the Deaf; Learning Disabilities Association of America; Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine). To give context, according to Grand View Research: the size of the global speech and voice recognition software market was valued at $17.17 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.9% from 2023 to 2030; the size of the global AI market in education was valued at $1.82 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.0% from 2022 to 2030.

It is clear from this data how the gap that has been growing with COVID can only expand further and further until it becomes progressively more difficult to bridge.

Pedius has created an innovative, technological solution that addresses the problem described above by providing an inclusive tool for students with such conditions, ensuring that they have fair and equal access to classes: Pedius Education.

In the classroom, the professor uses a microphone that automatically sends audio to a tablet on which, via the Pedius Education app, the audio will be transcribed into real-time text for the student so it can be read on the device's screen. For e-learning, Pedius integrates subtitles during online classes, using the same functionality in different locations.

Going into the specifics of the service, Pedius provides real-time subtitles using speech recognition technologies in a way that is totally transparent to users.

Audio is captured through a microphone and sent to the Pedius infrastructure, which generates subtitles in real time (within three seconds of when the audio is sent). A user can also access transcripts of a recorded lesson from other devices.

The developed software supports several languages: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, and Amharic. At the beginning of each recording, you will be asked for the language spoken by the teacher during the lesson, so you can choose the exact transcription language.

From the Live Lessons section, you add (or choose) a course to take. Once the recording starts, you begin to receive subtitles of the live speech. The student can pause or stop the recording whenever he/she wants, without losing the transcripts received until then and automatically saved in the Courses section.

In the Courses section it is possible to find the history of the lessons taken: the last recent lessons and folders related to the courses added. Each lesson can be saved within a Course, can be renamed and moved within other folders for more orderly management of all lessons.

To promote greater readability and adapt to different student needs, font size can be increased from the Settings menu.

Lately, thanks to AI research and developments, Pedius has been working on some new features: automatic production of summaries for lectures; automatic processing of concept maps; and real-time translation of speech in the different supported languages.

Students with disabilities are those who report having one or more of the following conditions: blindness or visual impairment that cannot be corrected by the use of glasses; hearing impairment (e.g., deaf or hard of hearing); orthopedic or motor disability; speech or language impairment; learning, mental, emotional or psychiatric condition (e.g., severe learning disability, ADD or ADHD); or other health impairment or problem.

The target audience for our solution is primarily students with deafness and other learning-related disorders, such as ADHD/ADD or with autism spectrum, dyslexia, etc. To date, these children find themselves excluded from classes in most cases due to inadequate classrooms and the lack of tools that facilitate their inclinations and ways of learning.

Adequate education can help people with disabilities gain greater access to employment, health care and other services, and develop a better awareness of their rights. 

In addition to this, the solution proposed by Pedius can also be used by foreign students who have not yet acquired skills and fluency in written language, and in e-learning situations.

At Pedius, we have been involved in accessible communications since 2013. Our team consists of 11 people with heterogeneous but complementary skills, ranging from AI to linguistics and marketing. 

Going into specifics, our technical team is highly specialized in stream management and audio streaming, with particular skills in development on iOS and Android devices (mobile and web) and with resources dedicated to Research and Development and implementation of AI technologies. Next to them, the marketing team can count on highly qualified figures in the fields of communication, marketing, sales and, with focus on the deaf community, in community management also through sign language.

Precisely with regard to our target community, over the years we have built a solid relationship with the deaf community, based on trust and constructive exchange. In fact, all our services have been expressly requested by the community and/or created based on their needs. Therefore, we are always looking for feedback from our users in order to refine our services in the best performing way possible. 

We are active in the field of social entrepreneurship and we often participate in important events in the field to expose our use cases and knowledge in the field of Diversity and Inclusion with a special focus regarding enabling technologies for people with impairments (not only sensory ones but also motor or concerning neurodivergences).

The company Pedius srl was established on October 11, 2013 following the award of the Working Capital grant and obtained the recognition of "Innovative Startup" status according to Decree 221/2012 in March 13, 2014, and subsequently participated in the redefinition of the regulations for "Innovative Startups with a social vocation" becoming one of the first companies with this recognition.

In December 2014 it received €410,000 in funding from TIM Ventures, Embed Capital and Sistema Investimenti, and in December 2016 it closed a €1.4 million Series A investment with TIM Ventures, Principia SGR and Invitalia Ventures.

To date, Pedius has more than 50,000 users in 14 countries around the world: Italy, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Austria, Germany, Canada, the United States, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, and Peru.

The Pedius Education project was born in 2020 and, after an initial testing phase carried out in 2021 with China University of Hong Kong and the Hochschule Hannover in Germany, is now active in Italy at the Universities of Sassari and La Sapienza in Rome, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.

We would like to apply to Solve for several reasons.

First, the chance to expose our solutions to your ecosystem is unparalleled: not only does it amplify the visibility of our project, but it also provides a unique opportunity to engage with key stakeholders and potential collaborators on a global stage. The prospect of gaining valuable and lasting connections, resources, and access to portfolio funding aligns perfectly with our long-term goals. Building lasting relationships within your ecosystem not only enhances the sustainability of our project, but also opens the door to additional funding opportunities and future collaborations.

Lastly, the opportunity to receive the grant, or be eligible for the prize, would significantly strengthen our project's progress, allowing us not only to develop and refine our innovative solutions, but also to expand our impact and reach more communities in need.

In conclusion, the combination of financial support, global visibility, potential prize winnings, ongoing support, and access to valuable connections makes this call ideal for the growth and success of our project.

Pedius stands as an innovative solution in several ways. On the one hand, it takes advantage of new technologies to offer a unique service toward a specific target user, the deaf community, which until now has found itself excluded from most everyday, social, and work-related communications.

Pedius' innovative technologies in this area enable deaf people to make private phone calls, participate in conference calls in the work environment, and be able to read real-time subtitles of lectures and training courses. For all these services, the founding principle is modularity, so that components can be quickly replaced with more advantageous or advanced ones when the opportunity arises. The entire infrastructure is designed to systematize services used by all products, sharing infrastructure, resources and technologies.

In addition, with its AI research Pedius is creating a range of integrative services that can be adapted to many other sectors, leading to the development of new business models based on expected outcomes, such as integrating AI assistants into existing learning management systems or developing specialized hardware for deaf students, generating a ripple effect throughout the value chain, promoting the use of AI and machine learning in other sectors, such as health care, inspiring other companies to explore new applications for AI.

Pedius' core values are equality and social inclusion. The social impact of the solutions offered is quite high, especially in industrialized countries. In fact, people with hearing disabilities often lack adequate education, followed by a high unemployment rate, thus representing a social emergency.

By providing real-time transcripts and summaries of lessons, our AI assistant can enable deaf students to fully engage with the material in class and improve learning outcomes by being able to study more actively and independently at home as well. This can have a transformative effect on the educational experience of such students, leading to improved performance and greater access to educational and employment opportunities, something they are precluded or severely limited from today.

The impact goals for the project, aligned with the UN SDGs concerning quality education (SDG 4) and reducing inequality (SDG 10), can be outlined as follows:

Impact Goal 1: Ensure equitable access to education for students with hearing impairment and learning disabilities.

Impact Goal 2: Reduce inequalities in access to education.

Several metrics can be used to measure these impact goals.

Monitoring the number of educational institutions implementing Pedius Education as a solution to ensure equitable access to education for students with hearing disabilities or learning disabilities.

Minutes of use: Track the total number of minutes students use the service during classes, both in-person and online. This can provide an indication of the level of service adoption and actual impact on the student learning experience.

Service activation requests: Record the number of service activation requests from students with disabilities or learning disabilities in order to assess the demand and potential impact of the service on the student community.

Currently our services leverage existing speech to text and text to speech technologies to help deaf people to communicate through their smartphone. We use our containerized software architecture to develop and deploy our AI services to test AI models and to document our research. We train and experiment our models on our cloud architecture, using the most famous cloud services.

Full-time staff: 11

Part-time staff: 0

Interns: 2

In our company, creating an inclusive environment is at the core of our corporate culture and operational practices. With a team of 11 people from diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds, we actively work to ensure that every individual feels valued and respected, including our female workers.

We recognize the importance of supporting women in the world of work, including periods of maternity leave. To this end, we have implemented robust corporate policies to support maternity, including paid leave, work flexibility, and assistance programs for new mothers. We are committed to creating a work environment that enables women to successfully balance work and family responsibilities, thus promoting a culture of mutual support and work-life balance.

One of our priorities is to ensure a welcoming and accessible work environment for everyone, regardless of their physical or sensory abilities. Over the years, we have implemented several initiatives to promote inclusion. For example, we have activated internships with young people who are deaf and deaf-blind, as well as people with other disabilities, providing them with opportunities for professional growth and learning.

Our involvement with the deaf community has prompted us to acquire specific skills through outreach and literacy courses in LIS (Italian Sign Language). This has enabled us to communicate more effectively and eliminate language barriers that may exist in our work environment.

In addition, we are committed to reducing our environmental impact by adopting sustainable practices. We prefer the use of shared transportation, such as public transportation, bicycles, and other environmentally friendly means, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting a healthy lifestyle. In addition, we mainly work remotely or in co-working spaces to minimize our environmental impact, and we ensure that all locations where we operate are accessible and barrier-free.

Ultimately, our commitment to creating an inclusive environment is not just limited to words, but is reflected in our daily actions and company policies. We firmly believe that valuing diversity and promoting inclusion not only enriches our team, but also makes us a better company overall.

The business model for Pedius Education focuses on selling licenses to universities.

In fact, universities are the customers of Pedius Education who buy the licenses to use our service as an accessibility support tool for students with hearing disabilities or learning disabilities.

Licenses are sold on the basis of the number of students or teachers who will use the service, or on the basis of the number of classes or expected time of use.