To be Latin American and to write a message in WhatsApp or an email from your mobile phone can be an impasse due to self-correcting applications that change jargon, slang, figures of speech, colloquialisms, and idioms for words into Spanish from Spain. Pronunciation and jargon from Argentina are two victims of speech recognition in apps, which is not designed to recognize different versions of a language as diverse as Spanish.
To end this problem, the Argentinean Inés Benson has created the free app, Guará, an automatic self-correcting tool that can be installed on Android keyboards. It uses a data base with over 40,000 words, typically utilized in the Argentinean dialect. This translates into an Argentinean self-corrector.
Although Benson created her start-up, Guará, to end this time consuming problem in her country, she soon realized that the situation repeated itself all over South America. Thusly, she decided to develop another free app called Dora, which uses Artificial Intelligence (A.I) to analyze oral presentations and give out advice to improve them, all the while converting speech into written text. Her latest creation, aside from the above, can also adapt and recognize different dialects and figures of speech in Spanish.
Thanks to these innovations, Benson has been chosen as a winner in the Latin American Innovators Under 35 from the MIT Technology Review LATAM edition.
Dora emerged because “the precision rate in the discourse analysis in Latin America is very low. This app identifies colloquialisms and reduces the self-corrections thanks to A.I and its broad word data base and concepts by region.” With Dora, it doesn't matter which modality of Latin American Spanish the user speaks because it recognizes the different language mannerisms from all over the continent.
Benson sells her product Dora to call centers to suggest improvements in the operators’ calls. She is also using it to assist the governments of Argentina and Chile, thus furthering the development of the start-up. The young innovator details that, with Dora, "you can record yourself and it gives you feedback on your presentations and speeches.”
The head of the department of the Incubation of Business Support of the Technological and Scientific Park of Poznan, Poland, and jury member for the 2019 Latin American Innovators Under 35, Ana Tórz, considers the solution given by Benson having a “high business potential, and is very developed and extremely oriented to profit.”
