The Babelverse Story : The Vision
Since starting Babelverse a year ago now, we’ve wanted to write a blog sharing our story and the amazing people we’ve been meeting. We love openness, and most of our major milestones have occurred in plain sight, so it seemed a no-brainer. It’s not that easy though, being a small team of two, and really wanting to focus on building rather than talking. But let’s try this anyway (we’ll start by playing catch-up on our story so far, with a series of posts…)
Startegy 1 – 23rd Oct 2010
In late 2010 we noticed that Greece was gaining momentum with regards to entrepreneurship and innovative thinking (keep it up guys!). Excited about this and wanting to be involved, we attended most of the related meet-ups and events; notably Startegy, which is focused on getting people to start their own venture. It starts by people pitching a variety of ideas on stage, getting feedback from the audience, and then brainstorming to further refine the project.
We were in the audience listening to the different pitches, some were in Greek, a few in English, and the others in some kind of “greeklish”. In any case, a large part of the room had a hard time understanding, which was core to the success of the event, the audience voted on the ideas pitched – it was important that everyone understood!
Near the end of the pitches was the moment everything came together and the idea was formed.
And literally 5 minutes later we where on stage pitching our rough-around-the-edges solution of “person-to-person simultaneous interpretation via your smart-phone”. We received a tremendous reaction from the audience, and the rest is history 
We then got to work researching, gathering feedback, thinking about features, business model and the challenges, and planning our next steps.
The idea can be summarised as so:
Babelverse disrupts the traditional conference interpreting industry, by removing its reliance on expensive on-site interpreters and specialised hardware.
Furthermore, it will allow anybody to benefit from on-the-spot or over the phone interpretation, during their everyday conversations and while they are travelling, for around the cost of a mobile phone call.
And as opposed to other attempts to accomplish this using technology (with a combination of speech recognition, machine translation and robotic speech – thus 3 points of failure), Babelverse will rely on a network of human interpreters, preserving the quality, tone and emotion of the spoken word. As well as context and cultural relevance - much better than any algorithm!
We want to gather millions of members all over the world, making on-demand interpretation in any language easily accessible, available to everyone, anytime, everywhere, and on any device.
Our vision is the seemingly science-fictional idea of everyone being able to simply talk to each other in their respective native languages, and seamlessly understand each other.
What sparked the idea of Babelverse?
Babelverse was not something that we’d been planning, it was one of those out-of-the-blue ideas, based on a culmination of real-life experiences. Here are some of those that brought us there, stirring up the thoughts that lit the spark:
- Both of us were living and working in Athens at the time, and we often had a problem with the language barrier (the little Greek we did know, didn’t get us far!), during business, daily life, conferences.
- We noticed how traditional interpretation was set up at conferences like TEDxAcademy (4th Oct 2010): it required special hardware and on-site translators which have to be sourced and then attend the venue.
- Someone mentioned the Babels, a group of volunteers that provide interpretation at World Social Forums.
- Back in 2007 Mayel created “Babelizer”, a groundbreaking platform for crowd-sourced translation/subtitling of any online video (before the fairly similar DotSub launched).
- Of course, we are also both fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its babel fish.
- And a lot more, some of which we aren’t even aware of…
Continue reading the next part of our story far
Tags: athens, babelverse, greece, idea, startegy, startup, vision