One day he said enough. He no longer wants to receive any more audio via WhatsApp from his friends, colleagues or family.. Sometimes they come to me at a time when I can’t hear them, or I’d rather read a text than receive a two-minute voice message, says mechanical engineer Saltea. Mara Jimena López Morillowho in a few months went from working in a dependent relationship to becomingowner from your own company: TranscribeMe, a chatbot that translates voice notes into text and since its launch last March, has not stopped adding new users around the world.

Thanks to the Artificial Intelligence translator I created together with nuclear engineers Ignacio Fabrecurrently owned 1,300,000 users from various countries, López Morillo fulfilled his entrepreneurial goals. A challenge that currently forces him to work without a schedule and at full speed, but with a satisfaction he has never experienced. In just six months everything happened. That’s crazy. We never thought that things would escalate like this, said López Morillo, who also received recognition from the Salta government for being the first woman from the province to become a mechanical engineer.

In late February, the TranscribeMe prototype was launched, and the first to receive contact on their phones were the family and friends of the two engineers, who were asked to use the chatbot and provide their opinions. Organically, and by word of mouth, This contact number +549 11 5349-5987 was sent thousands of times and reached one million users in just two months.

Yesterday I checked the metrics to get more precise details. In June we reached half a million users. Today we have 1,300,000. And about 100,000 use it every day. Then there are also customers, namely those who use chatbots for work purposes, namely around 5,500 people. And half of it comes from outside, Morillo concluded.

-What is the initial investment?

In the beginning, this is a risk that costs a lot of time and money without knowing what could happen. We have to maintain free access for a long time for the app to have good reach. It was a big investment for us because we have to pay for WhatsApp APIwhich costs approximately one dollar for each person who uses it every day. About $80,000 to support the entire free user base. Fortunately, today we have started to recover a little investment with the number of customers we have. Of the 5,500 people, half came from abroad, mainly from Chile, Uruguay and Spain. They all pay $2.80 per subscription. I, in Argentina, it costs 800 pesos, and its use is unlimited.

-How does the system work?

Operation is simple. Once a contact is scheduled, like any other, users must forward the audio they want translated. Within seconds, the AI ​​chatbot will say that it is transcribing, and convert the entire conversation to text format. The precision in how it works is one of the keys to a chatbot. Correctly detect words, questions, pauses and punctuation. He is even able to identify emotions, such as crying. Additionally, if the text is very long, it gives you a summary. Since we launched the prototype, which was only translated into Spanish, improvements have been ongoing. The users suddenly increased and the translator started running slower, so we had to deal with it. We soon added other languages, such as English and Portuguese, and it is currently translated into around 30 languages. Artificial Intelligence intervenes in everything.

-What limitations does the free version have?

We had to iterate a lot on the business model. Initially free 20 minutes every month. Then we changed it to ten days free every month. Today we dropped it to five days, driven by the need to keep the entire user base free. Otherwise, they won’t cover our numbers.

-What are the latest innovations in this application?

In addition to working every day to make the model a little more agile, we also integrated OpenAI’s GPT into the chat. It is an artificial intelligence model that obtains answers over the Internet and responds to you. So, instead of googling and having to look for answers, chat already gives them to you. For example, you are having dinner with friends and suddenly the conversation comes up, Hey, how high is Everest? Instead of searching on Google and getting tons of answers, on WhatsApp itself, without consuming data, you ask questions in TranscribeMe chat. Likewise with anything. You can also ask him to write something. You can create content. For example, you could ask him to write a story for a 3-year-old boy who is afraid of monsters. And what it does is it searches the Internet for average responses.

-Is TranscribeMe patented?

Behind TranscribeMe, there are other similar contacts that translate audio into text and use WhatsApp as a platform, but since there is still no possibility to patent the code, there is nothing that can be done. That is, you can patent an idea, but because a transcriber’s idea is something very general, we can’t do that. The bad thing about software is that it doesn’t allow code to be patented, so we can’t do anything other than hide our code.

-What about audio privacy?

Especially during elections and political campaigns, many people and officials are afraid to use bots, because they do not believe in the fate that all these translations may suffer. This is usually the biggest concern when sharing personal information with tools that use artificial intelligence and have human creators behind them. But we explain it We do not store audio content. It is processed and authorized. This means we don’t have a database with all that information. If they hacked that database, we don’t have the information. It went through here but we didn’t save anything. That’s why we send security policies whenever they ask for it.

-Can deaf people use it for free?

It is a profit that arises on a collateral basis. We didn’t initially think about using it for people who are hard of hearing or have difficulty with audio compression, but it’s become a key tool for this audience and has also been very well received. We receive many messages from various schools, associations and communities. Therefore, if they send us a certificate, all these users have a free plan to use the transcriber unlimitedly, and it’s free.