U.S-based online work platform, CloudFactory, has announced the receipt of a $2 million (Kshs 180 million) program related investment from the Rockefeller Foundation to help it enhance employment opportunities for previously unemployed Kenyan youth. Leveraging this investment will help the platform expand its SpeakerText service for fast and accurate video and audio transcription within the country.
Reports have it that CloudFactory acquired SpeakerText in 2012. Two years later, it transitioned the service from relying on crowd sourcing to its own professionally managed cloud workforce in order to allow for more quality control and rapid scaling. As part of its backend processes, the SpeakerText service splits video and audio recordings into 10-second clips and dispatches them to large groups of workers for quick transcription.
“After we bought SpeakerText and upgraded the technology, we searched the world to find the best untapped talent. We identified Kenya as the hottest up-and-coming location in the world to build a transcription team because of Kenya’s abundant supply of talented workers with strong English skills.
CloudFactory’s SpeakerText service combines human and machine intelligence to provide high-speed, high-accuracy video and audio transcription,” said Mark Sears, CloudFactory’s Founder and CEO.
An enabler for the investment, which comes shortly after CloudFactory received $3 million in Series A venture funding, is the Rockefeller Foundation’s Digital Jobs Africa initiative, a seven-year $100 million scheme to improve one million lives by connecting high-potential but disadvantaged youth in Africa to sustainable digital employment opportunities and skills training.
“The Rockefeller Foundation’s Digital Jobs Africa initiative aligns with CloudFactory’s own social mission of connecting 1 million people to online work. This investment gives us the resources and flexibility we need to continue connecting the world’s best workers with the world’s most innovative software companies,” Mr Sears added.
As the CloudFactory workforce in Kenya has grown, it has serviced a variety of companies in various sectors including ESPN, Deloitte and the University of North Carolina. To make the service pervasive, it has been deliberately designed to integrate with leading video platforms such as YouTube, Ooyala and Brightcove.
Mamadou Biteye, Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Africa Regional Office, commented; “Using CloudFactory’s leading-edge technology to tap into Kenya’s highly-skilled workforce creates a win-win scenario that will greatly improve the lives of Kenyan youth who have limited access to alternative employment. CloudFactory is gaining reliable, high-performing workers to meet its customer demand, while Kenya’s workers are joining the global digital economy.”
By Emmanuel Iruobe
