A schoolgirl from Astana founded a platform which detect speech impairments associated with over 300 diseases. In this article Ukili Omarova shares how a personal story turned into a technological startup,El.kz reports.
Personal story
When Ukili was a child, both her grandmother and grandfather suffered strokes, after which they experienced serious speech difficulties.
That was the moment she first realized how difficult life can become for people who lose the ability to speak normally.
“When I began researching the problem, I discovered that over 800 mln people worldwide and over 50 million in the CIS countries suffer from speech impairments. It became clear that this was not just a personal story, but a major social issue,” she says.
At first, people around her viewed the project as a school experiment. Everything changed when the first results appeared, partnerships with clinics and feedback from specialists.
How the technology works
Users record voice samples in the application - the system processes them and builds a personalized recognition model. It adapts to the individual characteristics of a person’s articulation and becomes more accurate over time. The database already contains more than 30,000 voice recordings, and the recognition accuracy reaches 98%.
“Specialists pointed out that different diseases affect speech in different ways, so universal systems are often not accurate enough. That is why we developed a system that adapts to each user individually,” the developer explains.
The most challenging cases include severe aphasia, pronounced dysarthria in cerebral palsy, and later stages of Parkinson’s disease and ALS. In such cases, the system requires more training data. The team continues to expand the dataset with the support of 58 speech therapists from CIS countries.
“We are also useful for people learning a foreign language who want to get rid of their accent, or for those who feel nervous speaking in front of an audience. The platform offers video courses on public speaking,” the schoolgirl says.
From the 1st clinic to 19 partners
Convincing doctors to work with a technology developed by school students was not easy. The team presented a prototype, shared testing data, and gathered feedback. There are 19 partnerships now.
“At first, many people treated it as a school project. But when the first results and clinic partnerships appeared, the attitude became much more serious,” notes Ukili.
Academic support comes from a residency at Asfendiyarov University, one of Kazakhstan’s leading medical universities.
The team and age
The team consists of three members all from different schools in Almaty, selected based on their competencies.
“In technology and startups, age does not matter, what is important is results. When people see a working product, partner clinics, and real data, their attitude changes quickly,” says the project’s founder.
After presenting at various forums, representatives of clinics and investors from Japan, Korea, the United States, China, and Uzbekistan expressed interest in the project.
“The main result is the experience of creating a technological product and understanding how technology can solve social problems. But I hope the project will scale and help a large number of people,” says Ukili.