Using technology to turn micro-volunteering into a macro impact

Hi everybody, this is Somis.

So do re so mi lao re do doremi, simo, dada rose delo de se dots. Imagine you're a refugee fleeing persecution. You arrive at a refugee camp and you need to figure out how to access essential resources, whether it be food, water, education or access to health care.

The document I shared with you contains all of that information but like 44% of refugees, you couldn't understand what it said. In this case, it would have meant missing out on education for your children, access to food for your family, access to medical care, whether it's neonatal, general or urgent.

And that's because while many people think of language access as a non-essential service, not having it severely impacts the equitable access to resources and opportunities. 56% of refugees can understand the information that they've been given leaving 44% who cannot.

So when you consider the world's population of refugees, which is 36 million, that leaves about 15 million refugees, that can't understand anything they've been given. All of this leads to a host of issues whether it's discrimination, errors, confusion, adverse outcomes and denial of services.

So for example, let's say you're from an indigenous community that's being persecuted. Your language is being persecuted. You flee, you apply for asylum. If the people processing your asylum case cannot find an interpreter that speaks your language, your asylum case is automatically rejected.

And the path of the refugee is not direct. It's not the simple thing. They flee war persecution, climate change and then suddenly they're in a refugee camp for two days and then they go off to their host country. In fact, the average time that refugees spend in camps is 20 years and in those camps, it's not just one population with one language. Often refugee camps contain up to 20 languages that are spoken there.

If they're lucky enough to get resettled into a host country that presents another problem. They're now in a situation where they often don't speak the language and it's really hard to achieve independence and integrate.

And a lot of people are like, ok, but they reached the host country now they have access to services and resources. But the reality is that 70% 76% of aid workers report poor access to interpretation and translation and a lack of common language is the number one barrier to refugees receiving health care.

Now, I know you're thinking there are tons of existing solutions out there and there have been for decades, for example, remote interpreters. So for like professional hotlines, those services are often inaccessible to NGOs because of the prohibitive costs and often or not often, almost always prohibitive to refugees and immigrants themselves.

The second is in person interpreters. I personally love in person interpreters. I think they do a great job often. They are former refugees and immigrants themselves. But the reality of the issue is if you're in a refugee camp where there are 20 different languages being spoken to have enough in person interpreters in all the places that wants to serve. The need is nearly impossible.

And then we're, of course, we're all here at Re:Invent. So we believe in the power of technology. So we're like, ok AI machine translations are coming such a long way. It's true. They are coming a long way. But the reality is the quality of the translations is not good enough for these sorts of high stakes situations.

Just this year, multiple asylum cases were rejected as a result of poor machine translations and especially for low resource languages because you need a lot of data to train these models. And so for rare languages or low resource languages, languages that come from lower economic countries, they don't have the content online to train these language models.

And then lastly, people use family or children. I'm sure there are people probably in this room who are used as interpreters for their parents. And while it's a bonding experience, it does present some issues such as changing family dynamics. So the child has to act like an adult and the parent has to rely on their child or exposing to certain information. They're not old enough to, to even process or even for example, let's say there's a situation where a family member wants confidentiality. They're discussing something private, having another family interpret for them breaks that.

We understand this issue and we created a solution for it. We're a tech nonprofit that believes it's a human right to be heard and understood. It's our mission to eliminate language barriers for immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and anybody working with them.

Taimni actually means "translate for me" in Arabic. So, and what we do is we crowdsource the world's multilingual. So people who speak two languages fluently to provide free on demand, interpretation and translation for immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and anybody working with them.

Right now, we have over 40,000 volunteer translators on our app. We do this by using technology to allow every people everyday people to make do small acts to make a really big impact.

I'm gonna show you a little bit about how our app works. So if you're an aid worker or a immigrant or refugee, you select your language pairing, you request the translation, you add some filters, maybe you specifically want a female and you click request.

Once you click request, our machine learning algorithm reaches out to hosts and groups of translators until somebody responds to the requests and accepts it. When they do that they're connected into a session where they can send voice notes, photos, text messages or get on an internet call on the translator side.

If you're a multilingual, you sign up and you enter the, the languages that you speak. When someone makes a request there, can you get a notification on your phone? If you're available, you respond. Yes. If not, you ignore it. If you respond to us, you can be connected with them in a session, get on a phone call and help them access the services that they need.

So far, we've achieved a lot in the past few years. We've connect to people in need of translation or interpretation over 100,000 times and have interpreted over a million minutes and translated over 3.5 million words. The past few years have been challenging but rewarding. But the future is even more exciting.

In 2024 we plan to use AI to help bridge the digital divide. We want to leverage AI to increase the accessibility, the quality and the scale of language, access to refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers worldwide.

We have three main projects that we're pursuing. The first is called Taimni Reach Plus. The sad reality is that our app is actually only in English. And I know that's very ironic, but the reality is we never had the resources to localize it in all these different languages.

We're gonna be using generative AI to create a process that localizes the app and makes it accessible by making it voice activated. So not only is it accessible in different languages but also to people with low tech literacy and people who are illiterate. A lot of refugees we serve can't access our app because they might be illiterate even in their own languages.

This will equip not only refugees and immigrants to navigate the app independently, but also we will expand our global reach. Because right now the main populations we serve and the language pairing are like English to Dari, English to Spanish, English to Swahili. With this expansion with Reach Plus, we can start serving to Chewa to Swahili or for example, French to Turkish and you know, the combinations are incredible and the populations and geographies you can serve are really great as well.

The second project that we plan to pursue using AI is called TJN First Pass. What we do is we use machine translation to send a first stab of a translation of a document, a text message or even a voice conversation to the volunteers, increasing the efficiency. But then we give them the capability to check the translations, modify it and improve it.

What that does is it saves time for translators and allows them to serve more people. Now, the third project takes Taimni First Pass a step further. It's called The Hub. What we do there is we take these corrected refined translations and we feed them back into the AI language models to help train them to help train these models that are often under trained because they're for lower resource languages and are very inaccurate.

So what we do with these solutions is we increase access currently in the present while improving the long term solution of AI translation that can be relied upon.

I want to talk about how you can help with this. Like I talked about how we turn micro volunteering, which is a great concept because every one of us wants to give back. But often we're like, well, I can't commit to Tuesday from 2 to 4 p.m. or I can't commit from this time to this time. This allows people to volunteer when they're available, how they're available. But it still makes a big impact because what we're doing is we're gathering thousands and thousands of multilingual globally.

The number one thing you can do right now is sign up as a translator. If you are a multilingual, we would love to have you on our app depending on your language pairing. It might take a while to get a request or you'll get five a day. It really depends on how popular your language is and how many interpreters are available for that language.

Another thing you can do is connect to Taimni NGOs that you think could use us whether they're the local food bank. A teacher at a school that serves, you know, students who are multilingual or maybe the students speak English, but the parents don't, maybe it's a pro bono lawyer. If you know an organization that could use our help, please share Taimni with this organization. You can also contact me afterwards and we can discuss possible collaborations.

So far, I've given you different ideas of how you can make a difference in this. As author Robin Hobb once said, "Every small unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world." At Taimni, we truly believe that and we invite you to join us in this mission.

Thank you so much.