As Facebook, Google and smartphones were becoming more ubiquitous in society, the one-time IBM research engineer and program director Igor Jablokov ’01 MBA stood on a stage before an audience, opened a Motorola Razr flip phone and began to speak. Behind him on a giant screen, for all to see, his words appeared. The year was 2006, and the event was Five Ventures Challenge, an entrepreneurial pitch competition sponsored by UNC Charlotte. The pitch competition was the forerunner of today’s Charlotte Venture Challenge.
This speech-to-text technology was the impetus for Jablokov to launch Yap Inc., a startup that offered a fully cloud-based speech-to-text transcription platform. Amazon purchased Yap in 2011, using the revolutionary technology to eventually create Alexa, Echo and Fire TV.
Today, Jablokov is an “Industry Luminary” according to Speech Technology Magazine. His latest venture, Pryon, is taking the tech world by storm. It is a knowledge cloud company that aims to reduce the distance between people and information through artificial intelligence.
Read more at Inside UNC Charlotte.