Why we call ourselves “Sunflower AI”

Everything started on December 30, 2020, when I uploaded my first video to my YouTube channel lingzhihandmade. Now, three years later, I have 200k subscribers on YouTube and Instagram. While growing my channel, I always had a problem with captioning my videos. Because of my accent and the specialised crocheting terminology I use, YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles were never accurate enough, and I had to spend hours correcting them by hand. Then in September 2023, my husband Chuhao met Siva (a fellow fast.ai alumnus, with a PhD in linguistics) at the Queensland AI Summit in Brisbane, and told him about my video captioning problems. Amazingly, within 2 weeks, Siva managed to build a custom AI tool to generate accurate captions for my videos, reducing the error rate from 15% to 3%. The three of us then decided to form a team, aiming to build AI tools to improve video captioning efficiency for YouTubers. At the beginning, we called ourselves “Old Fat Boy”, because it’s a funny and memorable name.

‍

‍

‍

We then pitched our startup idea at the Startup to Scaleup (S2S) Summit, winning a $10K cash prize, and a lot of publicity for our idea. Soon, an event organiser for CSIRO reached out to us, enquiring if we could do live captioning for their ON Core event in 2 weeks’ time—we answered “Yes”! That was when we realised it was now time to find a proper name and set up our company. We chose “Sunflower AI” (and picked the sunflower emoji as our logo) because the most popular video on my YouTube channel is the one on how to crochet a sunflower. Plus, the sunflower is my favourite flower, as it always reminds me of happiness, brightness and being positive!

‍
‍

‍

After successfully delivering our live captioning for the CSIRO event, we received lots of interest. We also met with Brendan Lonergan, who is the president of Hearing Matters Australia, a not-for-profit organisation supporting people living with hearing loss.  We are surprised to know that 1 in 6 people in Australia has hearing loss, and this number is predicted to increase to 1 in 4 by 2050. There appears to be a great need for affordable and user-friendly live captioning services. We also learnt that the sunflower is globally recognised as a symbol for non-visible disabilities, also known as hidden disabilities or invisible disabilities. Although this is a coincidence, perhaps this is our destiny that we have chosen the sunflower as the name of our organisation!

‍

Our long-term goal in delivering affordable AI-driven live captioning is to make every venue accessible to those with hearing loss, from the classroom to the opera house, and from train stations to international conventions.