Why and how was Smart Scribe created?
The idea to create Smart Scribe originates from a personal experience of one of the cofounders.
This experience was so tedious and distateful that it allows to seed in his mind the idea to design and develop an automatic transcription online solution.
As a marketing research consultant, his spouse is often led to conduct individual and group interviews. Then, she must transcribe these interviews into text, to be able to synthesize their content and perform a deeep analysis, provide valuable insights and conclusions.
Transcription is clearly not her cup of tea, and her typing skills are unfortunately relatively limited. Gradually, this task requires her more and more time until it reaches insane proportions.
One day, seeing her overwhelmed, he offered her to transcribe her interviews so she can focus on synthesis and analysis, and meet the deadlines she has committed to.
⏳ After many hours of work while constantly juggling between Microsoft Word and audio player, this becomes obvious. This task is uninteresting, extremely tedious, time-consuming and pretty exhaustive.
💡 That's when the idea came to him to dictate - listen and repeat rather than write - the content of the interview using a speech recognition application of his smartphone. It turns out the transcript provided by the speech recognition app for this interview read aloud is of excellent quality, so he only has to make slight adjustments to get a perfect transcript.
💪 What happened next is a long story, an entrepreneurial journey driven by a keen interest in speech recognition and articifial intelligence technologies, a timely meeting with cofounder, and the unwavering will to design and build a fast and reliable automatic transcription solution.
What is a typical day like for the Smart Scribe team?
☕ For most of us, it begins with a lots of coffee.
In fact, there is not really a typical day, as we have multiple things to do and finally not many repetitive tasks. But this is quite pleasant because there is no monotony and no room for boredom..
Most of us work from home, as this allows us to find a better balance between professional and personal life.
As we favor working from home, being well organized while being connected is key for us. So we use collaborative tools to work efficiently as a team and increase our productivity. We communicate together almost every day through Discord, it's our prefered channel to discuss about our day-to-day activities.
What are your short-term objectives ?
🍾 At the end of the year 2021, we launched a beta version of Smart Scribe limited to a restricting number of users.
The feedbacks gathered from our first customers allowed us to considerably improve our automatic transcription solution, before we open it to a wider audience in April 2022.
Our priorities for 2023 is to launch the German, Spanish and Italian versions of Smart Scribe to penetrate new markets, reach a broader audience and acquire new customers.
We also need to strengthen our sales and digital marketing teams, so we plan to hire several new talented people over the next 12 months.
An inspiring quote, character or movie?
The Netflix docuseries The Last Dance, which chronicles the story of Michael Jordan's rise and tells the tale of the Chicago Bulls dynasty in the 1990s 🏀
"Michael Jordan's the only player that could ever turn it on and off... and he never freakin' turned it off!"
Roy Williams, University of North Carolina Basketball Coach
👉 The Last Dance on Netflix with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman - 1 season, 10 episodes 🍿📺