You may remember the Nicole Kidman thriller The Interpreter, where she’s working as a translator at the UN and overhears something she shouldn’t, spoken in an obscure language.
Real-time translation has been the skill exceptional people have managed for centuries, but now artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming what’s possible and Sydney social impact startup Sunflower AI is at the cutting edge of possibilities.
Sunflower AI won Best New Idea award, presented by ACS Labs, at the recent Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards. This award recognises a startup, less than two-years-old, that is changing the world for the better with their bold ideas.
The Sydney startup is a real-time captions creator that can provide live translations in 32 languages. Since its launch in late 2023, Sunflower AI’s clients have included the NSW Government, CSIRO, Tank Stream Labs, the Spark Festival and University of Queensland.
At the closing pitch night at Spark Festival, cofounder Chuhao Liu gave a live demonstration of the platform’s capabilities as he spoke in Mandarin and it was translated to the audience.
Sunflower AI was born out of co-founder Lingzhi Kang’s frustration with the subtitles on her YouTube channel. Her most popular clip was a crochet video featuring the vibrant Sunflower. But correcting the AI-generated subtitles was a tedious process that took twice as long as the 15-minute clip.
They realised that demand for accurate captioning extended beyond individual content creators and Sunflower, a flower that symbolises happiness and warmth, was born. The platform’s large language model (LLM) learns from individual speakers to provide more accurate and nuanced translations of what they’ve said, or in the case of something like simply captioning English, can recognise accents for more accurate transcriptions.
Best New Idea was one of the most hotly contested categories in the second annual Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards, with around 40 entries.
The quality of startups involved saw the judges award a Highly Commended to proptech platform Build Buddy, which is helping democratise the home building process, making it accessible and affordable by allowing users to design, approve and build their new home without having to engage a traditional builder.
The other finalists were: Truyu, a digital identity protection tool that alerts consumers the moment their identity is being used – or misused – at merchants like banks and telcos, to take immediate action; and Andromeda Robotics, which is revolutionising healthcare with Abi, a humanoid companion robot to address critical needs in both aged-care and children’s hospitals.
While Sunflower AI‘s ability to translate immediately into multiple languages is invaluable, Chuhao Liu views it as a social impact startup because it’s all about inclusivity and accessibility at events, including for the hearing impaired, so people feel less isolated in a crowd.
It’s a bigger issue than many realise. While 1-in 6-people globally has hearing loss, less than 1% of events with 50-plus people attending are accessible for the hearing impaired. Liu’s goal over the next 12 months is to make 10% of in-person events in Sydney feature Sunflower’s live captions.
It’s simple to use and audiences can even use their mobile to view live captions and translations, providing transcripts afterwards, along with a summary of the key takeaways.
Liu says Sunflower’s translations help bring people closer together at events.
“We are making a big social impact to make events accessible to everyone,” he said.
“Australia has a large number of diverse cultural backgrounds, so Sunflower AI can help break the language barrier for immigrants by providing live translations of 32 languages.”
And even Nicole Kidman can’t do that.
See the full list of 2024Â Startup Daily Awards winners here.
This article is brought to you by Startup Daily, with the support of ACS Labs.
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