#108 Low Resource, High Potential — NeuralSpace CEO Felix Laumann on Democratizing NLP

Felix Laumann, CEO of NeuralSpace, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the no-code, low-code natural language processing (NLP) platform for low-resource languages.Felix recalls his journey to startup CEO in the NLP milieu after coming from a computer and mechanical engineering background; plus the origin story of NeuralSpace. He discusses the difficulty behind building models for low-resource languages when faced with less than 1% of data available.The CEO recounts his experience connecting with investors to raise a USD 1.7m seed round. He explains how machine translation fits into their framework, with the main use-case being building chatbots.Felix reveals how they collect data and their plans to work directly with linguistic professionals to cover different pronunciations, tones, and emotions. He shares plans to add more speech capabilities and cover nearly any fundamental NLP project or problem.First up, Florian and Esther talk about the language industry news of the week, with the final agenda for SlatorCon Remote complete. Esther talks about Transline Gruppe swapping majority owners as former backer LEAD Equities exits via sale to investment firm Blue Cap. Florian then reviews Slator’s coverage of the skills required as a post-editor, MT engineer, and PE consultant.In M&A, ZOO Digital announces the launch of ZOO Korea, alongside the acquisition of a 51% stake in Seoul-based subtitling and dubbing provider, WhatSub Pro. Meanwhile, US-based Verbit expanded its transcription services in the UK with the acquisition of market research specialist Take Note.