Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Spence Green, CEO of Lilt (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your community of translators?

Spence Green: It is a reasonably large community. It’s smaller than some of our competitors, but there is a reason for that. The reason is that we believe in our community. We would rather have a smaller group of highly-specialized people that we utilize completely than to have a much broader group of people that we treat like a crowd. We are building the technology at the same time that we are building the operational process.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I enjoy listening to you and hearing what you have been doing. I keep my eye out for finding platform companies. You may want to look up my writing on the Platform-as-a-Service. I think you will enjoy that. It’s an area that we are covering extensively.

Switching gears, what are some open problems that see that you would like some new startups to go pick up using your platform? From where you sit, you are developing the platform and you are looking for developers to develop applications. If you could have your wish, what are some apps that you would like to see entrepreneurs take on using your platform?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Spence Green, CEO of Lilt (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Give me some examples of things that Google Translate cannot do, but you can.

Spence Green: Google Translate can do the same thing a person can do. You can give a string input and it can give you a string output. People can do that too. What you don’t have is any certificate of correctness. You don’t know if it is right or not.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If I am a developer, what are my choices in terms of picking a machine learning engine or platform? What am I choosing from? You and who else?

Zach Shelby: What kind of developer are you? That is the real question. Rationally, machine learning and AI tooling have been designed for data scientists. Almost all machine learning tools are designed for the data scientist. That is okay if your job is to solve back-end cloud problems with machine learning.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Spence Green, CEO of Lilt (Part 1)

This is a terrific conversation about a SaaS-enabled BPO company, Lilt, in the domain of language translation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start introducing our audience to yourself as well as Lilt.

Spence Green: I am the CEO of Lilt. We have two parts of our business. The private sector of our business focuses on creating global customer experiences so that all products and services are available in all languages. We work with enterprises that want to make the user experience in other languages better. Usually, it is as good and personalized as it is in English.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have 12,000 developers currently building ML applications, what is the constitution of these developers? Are these 12,000 developers sitting inside larger companies or entrepreneurs building new apps for new ISVs?

Zach Shelby: We have the whole spectrum. That is something that we have strived for. When you bring in new technology in the space, machine learning is advanced for a lot of these industrial companies and developers, we have to be available at the education level. We do have people who are just beginning and learning about this. They are typically professionals, but they might not be applying machine learning in their work. They might be C or C++ programmers but not yet using machine learning.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on how you managed to get 12,000 developers working and building on your platform.

Zach Shelby: What I found to work best with developers is radical transparency, focusing on what they care about, and how they work with their product. In our case, we provide machine learning tools in the cloud and lots of software around that. We are providing an open TRR platform so we don’t treat a developer as a customer, we treat them as a part of our team.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby (Part 1)

Zach is building a Machine Learning platform company upon which 12,000 developers are building apps.

This is a terrific conversation that spans how to build developer networks for a PaaS company, and numerous related issues.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Edge Impulse.