About the role
This Role
You will build the platform that lets people around the world improve audio models for their own languages and use cases. Your work will enable anyone who cares about a language to create production-grade models for it — even without ML expertise or significant funding. We think this is the fastest way to build great audio models for every language.
This is a founding role, so your scope will expand and change as UpliftAI grows.
What we do
We build voice models and voice applications for regional languages — Urdu, Bengali, Pashto, Greek, and more — so people around the world can use technology by simply speaking.
We gather our own data, build our own labeling tools, train our own models, and design our own voice infrastructure. This fully integrated approach is what lets us deliver the highest-quality models, and the best developer experience, for regional languages.
Why our work matters
Over 60% of the world's population only speaks a regional language. Today voice models aren’t good enough in their languages.
Large tech companies are unable to give this work tier1 priority because they are busy defending their primary business. In fact, in all big labs regional languages are funded by Marketing/PR budgets.
If UpliftAI doesn’t do its work, a large part of the world may continue to experience significant AI technical lag — further worsening the income divide between countries.
But also, it’s very cool making machine speak soooo well (check out our homepage).
The story of how we started
Hammad left Apple and took a year off to figure out what to do in the next phase of his career. During this time, he started a side project gathering data for Pakistani languages so people could talk to ChatGPT by speaking (this was before they supported voice mode).
To gather this data, he traveled to factories and rural areas in Pakistan. While speaking with business owners there, he learned that many businesses are not using digital tools (like HR software or inventory management) simply because their workforce cannot read or write. (Btw, Pakistan is the 5th most populous country in the world, but 42% of all adults there cannot read).
