#Elsa speak founder code#
#Elsa speak founder professional#

On the contrary, at ELSA our researchers have the power (via a single click on our CI/CD pipeline) to deploy their code directly to production, impacting millions of users of the ELSA app right away. Unfortunately, many of these innovations end up locked in a drawer and never get to see a real user. In some big corporations the research labs are created to “impress” the company stakeholders (or the public in general) by providing a showcase of how innovative the company is or can be.More so, instead of measuring our success using impact factors, we measure it with startup KPI metrics such as engagement, retention, virality or conversion. In a startup like ELSA, we are also interested in pushing the state-of-the-art forward, but rather than getting kudos from peer researchers, we are driven by the many users that get to use our new algorithms or improvements we make to the core. This awards the researchers and their team some prominence in their field and will make it easier for them to get new funding to continue with the research.

In academic research the main goal of the researchers is to advance the state of the art on a given topic and, thanks to it, publish their work in top tier conferences or journals.

In addition, here are some other differences I have observed over the years: Money in a small startup is a finite resource, and your research is likely to have an impact on the near/mid-term future of the company. In addition, you need to continuously measure your progress and be able to quickly switch gears if you see the project is not going in the direction you were initially expecting and is stagnating. Research in a small startup means, among other things, that you need to choose very carefully what problems you want to solve, making sure that you can make good progress in a reasonable time. Building such a system was not a trivial task, and I don’t think we are done yet, but what I found most challenging (although also very interesting) has been to always keep a balance between pure research and continuous delivery of results.īuilding a product out of your research at ELSA has been quite different from the research I was used to in universities and corporations I have been lucky to be part of. Our goal was to build an accurate system to detect what pronunciation/intonation mistakes users make when speaking English, and to help them improve by offering relevant feedback. I am aware that both academic and corporate research have many implementation variants, all of them valid if the objectives they set themselves are achieved.Īt ELSA we were set from the start with the objective to build the best English language speech assistant for people that feel shy to practice English with another human or do not have the opportunity or means to do so.

#Elsa speak founder professional#

In this post I highlight the main differences that exist, in my opinion, between the research team we have built at ELSA and some of the realities I have been able to observe so far during my professional career. This new challenge has been so far both a great learning experience and a hell of a ride! My professional path until that point had been focused on research in speech and multimedia technologies, both in academia and corporate. When I joined ELSA Speak in 2015, I was tasked with the challenge to build and lead the engineering and research teams at ELSA.