Speaker 1: Our first guest, Verbit, has emerged as the leader in the $30 billion transcription industry with its voice AI solutions, simple integrations, and the largest professional captioner workforce in the world. And joining us now with more is Tom Liebknecht, founder and CEO of Verbit. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: So tell us a little bit about Verbit. I mean, what exactly is it that you do?

Speaker 2: So Verbit is, as you said, like the leader in the voice AI and accessibility solution. And we have vertical specific application around transcription and captioning. If it's in the media space, in the legal space, education space, enterprise space, and growing the numbers of vertical we operate in. And, you know, the demand for our solution driven by regulations. So we help people to enjoy verbal content and make it accessible via our AI power transcription platform.

Speaker 3: Tom, we'd like to hear a little bit about your journey as an entrepreneur. I know we met a while ago when we were learning at the IDC. Reichman University. Now it's Reichman University. So can you tell us a little bit about your journey? And like, where did you start from? And how come like a lawyer, you know, getting into this very specific field?

Speaker 2: This sounds like out of this world. Yeah, so usually my pitch is I'm a lawyer and no one is perfect, right? This is how I start when I'm talking to investors, etc. But basically being a lawyer gave me two major things. One, I had to work closely with entrepreneurs and realize I don't want to be the legal counsel. I want to be the entrepreneur myself. And the second thing is so how much time and how much money we're spending on the transcript of the legal depositions. And it was always late and not accurate. I found myself sitting down and doing the editing jobs for those transcripts. I was really, really frustrated customer and changed the vendor that we work with every few months. And then I came to myself, say, hey, how there is no technological provider, something more innovative to solve this problem. And then I said, maybe it's the sign that I should go and invent it myself. And yeah, and I would never imagine that, you know, five and a half years after will be, you know, more than 1,000 employees, more than 3,000 customers, raised more than $600 million. And this is like journey and been amazing so far. And we're just getting started. But, yeah, it's evolved over time. And then, you know, when I started to dig in about the industry, I realized that the legal vertical is one use case out of many, many others, as I mentioned, creating this $30 billion addressable market. You mentioned that it's going through digital transformation, right? So when investors thinking about which company to invest, and I'm as an investor myself today in 10 funds and more than 20 startups. So when I'm looking, where is the digital transformation coming from? And this is what we're doing for this manual professional transcription space. And as I said, just getting started.

Speaker 1: So I'm curious, you know, how does the technology actually work?

Speaker 2: So what is speech recognition? Speech recognition is algorithm that's showing you the best guess of what will be said based on statistical model, right? This is the AI voice to text. But it's much more than that because I said it's driven by regulation. So there is a demand for perfect 100% or 99.9% accuracy that it could be reached only by human, right? So, you know, on the one hand, you know, professional transcription being done fully manually. On the other hand, AI is 80%, 85%, and this is not the accuracy needed. So we have this unique hybrid model that combines the AI we built internally and basically what gives us the edge that we are customer-specific, vertical-specific building the model, right? You know, per customer and getting more data so the accuracy and the automation level is better and more consistent. And then we have a network of 35,000 freelancers from all around the globe that take the automated output, making the correction where needed in order to bring it to the professional 100% accuracy. And every time they're making the corrections, they supervise learning to the speech engine that gets better and better over time and make it, you know, to the customer. And there's a lot of workflow and integration, you know, per vertical, right? So it's in the education to integrate to the learning management system to create the workflow if it's in the legal, so the case management platform. So we know how to build the application for our customers the way they need it.

Speaker 1: And the AI is always learning and always improving.

Speaker 2: Getting better.

Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we're all teachers of AI, you know. Whether we want to know it or not. I want to ask you, we like to focus this show about the social impact of the project that we do, that we bring. Can you tell us a little bit about the social impact of Verbi?

Speaker 2: Yeah, there's plenty of those. It's interesting, we just launched our core value as a company. So the key one of them is to do good, right? So think about all the deaf people, right? So if people want to see this show and we don't have it accessible and transcribe and caption, they won't be able to consume this verbal information. And we, as part of our portfolio, we also have, you know, an app that helps deaf people to communicate on a daily basis, right? If you want to call your mom so you get a transcript in real time. So there's many applications for transcription in any way. Again, for all the deaf students, we're making the lecture accessible for all the people seeing the larger broadcaster like CNN, Disney, etc. Among Verbi customers, we make their content accessible for all the people that are hearing impaired. So one part of our mission is to make the words more accessible to those people with disabilities.

Speaker 1: Incredible technology. Tom Lipne, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

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