Sunflower AI in SBS News

Great to be interviewed by Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Australia at end of 2023.

SBS Link: https://www.sbs.com.au/language/chinese/zh-hans/podcast-episode/chinese-communities/cw9hm1gcl

Three words for my 2023: Teacher, Team and Audacity

1️. Teacher
I'm lucky to learn Fast.ai taught by Jeremy Howard which is the most practical AI course (and free). I feel grateful that Jeremy Howard kindly inviting me to his place where I met another fast.ai alumni and my current CTO Siva Kalyan

2. Team
I told Siva Kalyan that Lingzhi Kang, my wife and 130k subscriber YouTuber, has a video caption problem. Because of her accent and jargon, there is always 15% error in auto generated caption. Siva Kalyan solved it in 2 weeks and reduced error rate from 15% to 3%. We three formed a team.

3️. Audacity
We decided to pay $1k for a startup exhibition stall and a chance to pitch for $10k cash prize at S2S Summit. We won the prize and got our 1st customer who asked if we can provide AI live captions for a national event in 2 weeks. We replied yes and built the solution in 2 weeks with help of The Builders Club.

⭐ 2024
We now pivoted to live captions for live events because we're surprised to know 1 in 6 people in Australia has hearing loss. We aim to develop an affordable caption tech to make as many as possible live event accessible.

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Full SBS Chinese interview transcript in English (Translated by our team not an official transcript from SBS):

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SBS:

Hello, everyone. Today, we have Liu Chuhao, a founder in My2023, to share his story. Chuhao said his key words in 2023 are team, audacity, and teacher. Let's hear him out. Our guest for today is Liu Chuhao, a Chinese from Sydney. Hello, Chuhao.

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Chuhao:

Hello.

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SBS:

First of all, I want to congratulate you on winning a chance to be a part of Sydney. You won a prize from the Startup Fund. But we still have to hear Chuhao's story. What did he do in 2023 to get this prize and a good start in his own business?

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Chuhao:

I won a prize from the Startup Fund for the $10,000 in the pitch competition. I started learning AI three months ago. I learned about AI and AI technology. I took a class called Fast.ai that is popular all over the world. This class was very useful. I thought it was very good. I hosted a offline gathering of this class. I met the teacher of this class, the co-founder of Fast.ai, Jeremy Howard. He is from Australia. He was in 2021. He came back to Brisbane from the US. I wanted to meet him. I saw the Queensland AI Summit. I thought he would go. I signed up. When I flew there, I found out that he was attending it from online. I talked to him in the group chat. I said I was the organiser of Sydney's fast.ai in-person meetup. I flew to Queensland to attend this meeting. I really wanted to meet you. But it's a pity I didn't see you. He said, why don't you come to my house? He invited me to his house. He asked me to organize a group of fast.ai students who attended the summit. We went together. We organized three people in his house. Including myself. We met at his house. One of three is our current technical co-founder. After he joined, our execution was way faster. After we finished talking, he invited me to his house. My technical partner is called Siva. I talked to him. My wife is a full-time YouTuber. She teaches others how to do crochet. But in the process of doing it, she is Chinese. But she uses English. So her pronunciation has a strong accent. So in the process of creating subtitles, she always has 15% of the word error rate. She has to spend a long time to modify these subtitles. After two weeks, Siva solved this problem. He used the videos my wife, Lingzhi, had in her channel to train this algorithm. Then it can identify my wife's accent. So the accuracy rate has increased from 85% to 97%. We think this is great. Then we decided to form a team. The three of us.

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SBS:

I think what you just said is like a roller coaster for me. Your two keywords in 2023. You told me that one is teacher and the other is a team. They are in the two minutes you just explained. I feel like it's a very young kind of technical entrepreneurship. Is that what life is like? You said you wanted to start your own business. But there has been no progress in the past two years, right?

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Chuhao:

Yes, I was a PhD candidate in 2021. I decided to drop out PhD program and be a full-time entrepreneur. But there hasn't been much progress in the past two years. I've been thinking about what direction I should go. And then it's because I can learn the lesson of fast.ai. I can quickly get into the AI field.

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SBS:

So you were a PhD candidate. What kind of profession do you specialize in? It's civil engineering. But you got into this project of AI. It seems a bit of a change.

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Chuhao:

Yes, but I actually learned a lot of math during PhD program. I did research on the mathematical model. So in terms of math, I'm still more advantageous to learn AI.

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SBS:

I think it's very wonderful. For example, you have been in business for two years. In the process of no progress Will you have a dilemma?

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Chuhao:

Definitely. My wife gave me a lot of motivation. So she made a YouTube channel. She now has 120K fans. And basically can maintain the life of our family. The normal cost of living. So she told me that she made this thing. So no matter how long I work as a startup founder. We can all maintain our lives. My wife graduated from the Biology PhD. We met as a doctoral student and then got married. She is now teaching others how to do handwork, and needlework.

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SBS:

That's a wonderful story. Although it is very unrelated to her profession. But I think that her EQ and IQ that enabled her to focus on a very high-level scientific research. In fact, it can also make her pursue other passion in life. And then have her own career she wants to do. Why did she choose this one? Such a profession that is completely unrelated to her profession.

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Chuhao:

Because she is pregnant. She wants to take care of our child. Then that time happened to be during the COVID. So she chose this YouTube career. Because she can do it at home to take care baby and also help her find mindfulness.

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SBS:

I think everyone is talking about that young people can't find a job. But you two are both jumping out of ordinary people's thinking. And there is no such thing as what we call Read more books and then become old school. That kind of feeling. But it's very active. Have the creativity to use your knowledge. Do something with your wisdom.

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Chuhao:

I think PhD can give us confidence. Because PhD research is essentially in exploring a niche that no one has explored before. What we learned is this method of exploration. And another thing we learned a very important skill during the doctoral period. How to do presentation. How to tell our research to people who don't understand. To people who don't have any technical background. So we learned a lot of ability to distill. This is also a very important part.

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SBS:

Okay, Chuhao. Then you tell me the third key word in 2023 is audacity.

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Chuhao:

That $10,000 pitch prize. Before participating in the competition You need to pay $1,000 first. To be an exhibition of the summit. A company's exhibition. Then take this opportunity to win this $10,000 Australian dollars. To invest first. We believe in ourselves. We decided to invest this $10,00. After I discussed it with my team. We decided to do this.

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SBS:

So what is the main content of your project?

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Chuhao:

The content of our project is to help youtubers. To make them a personalized subtitle production model The whole intelligence model can understand their accent. So they don't have to change the subtitle.

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SBS:

After winning the prize. In addition to a prize. Is there any chance to follow up?

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Chuhao:

Yes. A staff of CSIRO have heard our speech at the site and asked us if we can do live captions for an in-person conference. We didn't know how to do it, but we said yes. We had an intense discussion, worked overtime and asked people to help. There is an AI Builders Club in Sydney. It's a community group of more than 400 people. The people there helped us a lot. We successfully did it. We presented the real-time subtitles we made with AI at a conference two weeks later.

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SBS:

You found that your technology is very meaningful to society, right?

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Chuhao:

I asked them why they needed the real-time subtitles. They said they had been contacted by someone and they had hearing problems. They told him that there would be the real-time subtitles. Accessibility is very important to this kind of activity. There is a hearing disability in Australia. After we started the project and pivoted into this direction, many people with hearing disabilities sent us messages. They said they were very grateful for what we're doing. It's like turn on a light in this world for them. I was very touched. They wanted to be involve in society. In live events. When there are more than 10 people talking, it's hard to hear the voice for them. There are many background sounds. It's important to them. It's meaningful. We want to make an affordable AI live caption and real-time. Ss they can participate in it. It's not just this. As an immigrant, as a Chinese, a non-native speaker in Australia, I often participate in the event. I don't have a good understanding. We can add a Chinese-English caption. A caption in your own language. A double-language caption. We can all be involved in this live event.

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SBS:

Great. Thank you very much, Liu Chuhao, for sharing your 2023 with us. Thank you. Thank you. We hope to hear more stories like this. You can download and listen to it on Apple Play, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you like.