We work for the sister company PAGES Media a film production company, a lot for Microsoft. We film at many events in Europe and also provide manual subtitles. In 2018, Microsoft created an internal guideline that requires events of a certain size to be subtitled. In the USA, subtitles are much more common and company boss Nadella has a disabled child himself. This is another reason why he is strongly committed to inclusion. Great guy! We often flew stenographers around the world, booked hotels for them and they typed their fingers to the bone at events.
Sometimes it went wrong: A service provider, who also connects the stenographer via Skype, only outputs his texts on the website. The technology at the event then has to filter out and display these live using a color key. Despite endless pre-testing, the display crashed at a large conference and the browser was displayed on stage with some kind of symbol. Unfortunately, this happened during a speech by the CEO of a huge corporation and in front of several thousand participants. Something went wrong again with another customer. A service provider had sent very young newcomers and they couldn’t keep up with what was being said. The subtitles were incorrect and the delays were far too long. Needless to say, neither the customer nor we were happy about this. And these assignments always cost a lot of money.
This is how the brilliant idea came about. Why not have the speech recognized by a computer? And the stenographer simply corrects from the comfort of their own home? After initial tests, we were immediately convinced. If it worked so well with a lousy laptop microphone in a noisy office, it had to work even better with good sound and optimized program code. From this point on, the idea grew. A real, digital product that also helps people. Wow! It was an instant hit and I often lay awake at night thinking about it. Why don’t we use artificial intelligence to make the results better and better? The machine works and the human just controls it. Cool! We looked for developers and the idea became a project, financed from my savings. What I get back is the wonderful and very motivating feeling of doing something worthwhile. In the meantime, EVE has already had its first live test and is about to have its first official release.
In the beginning, we called EVE EVA for many months. EVA is a basic principle of data processing and stands for input, processingand output. This is how programs are fundamentally structured. The idea: our service receives voice data, processes it into text and outputs it again. So simple – so fitting. But EVA was not so international. So we turned it into EVE. EVE stands for input, processing, input. Why is that still correct? For people with hearing impairments, the output, i.e. the former “A”, is also the input, i.e. our new “E”. This is how EVE came about.
The changeover was not easy for us, as we had been talking about EVA for a long time. IT folders, presentations and the like were also baptized this way. But after two weeks of constant self-improvement, we slowly got the hang of it. EVE learns faster 😉. The developers Robin and Daniel also slowly started to correct the old word everywhere. Today, there are only a few reminders of the old name.
Of course, our logo is no coincidence either. The great designer Ursl has put a lot of thought into it. The VE is positioned above the E (input), so it was added afterwards and makes the whole thing complete. Because our society is only complete if we think about others and take care of inclusion. If you don’t include, you exclude. There is nothing in between. And this mission also includes the processing of our communication and the (appropriate) input for our fellow human beings. The “V” and the “E” stand for these things.
