Arto Minasyan

Then we moved to U.S., got into Berkeley Sky Deck Acceleration Program, raised some seed capital.

And by 2020, we already had a very well-working technology and an app.

And then when COVID hit, we basically had a tech which was very useful for everyone working from home, right?

Because at home, you have a lot of background noise.

You have kids crying, dogs barking, just neighbors making random noise and so on.

And Crisp basically became very popular back then.

But we didn't stop at this one technology, and we decided to expand our offering with different AI technologies.

So we introduced accent conversion, meeting transcription, summarization, and now recently we also introduced voice translation technology.

So the offering expanded from just one feature to a lineup of different voice AI technologies.

And basically the ambition to grow the company number one voice solution in the market by bringing like the best voice I take either like in-house, built in-house or just like integrating the right voice I take into Crisp applications.

First we built the technology and it was like a machine learning model, a neural network that we trained in-house.

And back then we didn't have a lot of GPUs and we didn't have knowledge in like different frameworks, like TensorFlow and others.

So we built like a lot of things in-house trying to train the neural network.

And the main challenge back then was data.

So we tried to record a lot of noises, noisy conversation, tried to apply different tactics to generate a huge amount of data to train our proprietary machine learning model.

And it took about a year before we got a really working prototype for the technology.

And our primary idea back then was to license the technology to the big companies, right?

So any other conferencing solution or a phone manufacturer can embed our technology inside their product.

But then we realized that we need to have some demo for this, right?

We need to give our potential customers a tool to assess the technology faster and easier than we just can do, let's say, with API or SDK.