Bringing AI to every corner of Vietnamese life

Believing that home is the most important place in the world , Ta Thanh Hai and the OLLI team strive to apply technology to make home the most comfortable place, helping people enjoy life, raise children well and take care of loved ones.

Entrepreneur Ta Thanh Hai, Co-founder of OLLI Technology Company: Bringing AI to every corner of Vietnamese life

Believing that home is the most important place in the world, Ta Thanh Hai and the OLLI team strive to apply technology to make home the most comfortable place, helping people enjoy life, raise children well and take care of loved ones.

Ta Thanh Hai (right) and Bui Bach Viet - Co-founders of OLLI Technology Company.

Compete on par with Google and Amazon products

Smart speakers in the world seem to be no longer strange to everyone. Saving up to 80% of time for daily tasks such as making appointments, playing music, controlling home appliances, etc., virtual assistants on these speakers are shaping a convenient lifestyle in the future. However, not all speakers or virtual assistants understand Vietnamese or interact the way a Vietnamese person expects.

That is also the concern and worry of people who love technology and Vietnamese like two 8x engineers Ta Thanh Hai and Bui Bach Viet.

In 2016, the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed strongly around the world, promising to open a new era of technology. At that time, Bui Bach Viet was working in the banking industry, but he loved to explore the design of the product's technology system architecture. Meanwhile, Ta Thanh Hai, through his time working in Silicon Valley (USA), strongly responded to the creative spirit, creating meticulous and elaborate products. Hai also realized his passion for embedded programming technology combined with cloud and big data. Both found common belief when establishing OLLI Technology Company (OLLI).

Life is short, youth passes quickly. Every day when I wake up, I must live with passion so that when I am old, I will have less regrets about the things I did not choose to do.

- Entrepreneur Ta Thanh Hai, Co-founder of OLLI Technology Company

The images of urban elders struggling, even stressed, when using smart electrical equipment systems in their homes; the lonely elderly in the countryside when their children work far away; children from urban to rural areas glued to the TV and phones to find joy when their parents do not have much time to talk and play with them... have urged them to decide to start a business with the AI ​​Assistant Project and pure Vietnamese smart speakers to bring AI into every family, helping the lives of every member become lighter, happier, more positive and connected.

Technically, OLLI aims to master a complete ecosystem, including designing and manufacturing hardware devices in its own factory, building cloud platforms, Apps, AI research, and connecting partners for data content warehouses.

Making an AI assistant that can communicate and understand Vietnamese 5-7 years ago required a lot of data specific to language, culture, region, etc.

In May 2021, after 5 years of research and development, OLLI officially launched its first smart speaker and AI assistant product.

"The product has spread widely in Vietnam, competing well with smart speaker products from Google or Amazon in Vietnamese," Ta Thanh Hai excitedly shared.

To date, Maika AI assistant has more than 80,000 users and households covering all provinces and cities across the country. This platform has been connected with more than 50 smart home partners, becoming the leading AIoT platform, a familiar name to those who use smart homes in Vietnam.

Expanding products, bringing AI to every corner of life

Seeing the great potential of AI, Ta Thanh Hai believes that if we only rely on distributing smart devices, we will not be able to bring AI technology to every corner of Vietnamese people's lives. Accordingly, OLLI has begun to expand into providing its virtual assistant platform to technology partners, partners manufacturing electronic devices, and domestic refrigeration equipment.

In the process of distributing smart speaker products, Hai and his colleagues realized that the majority of speaker users are children and the elderly. Understanding this need, OLLI expanded the market to smart toy products, targeting children, helping them reduce their dependence on phones.

The time of raising investment capital for OLLI also helped Hai realize that smart, safe, and useful toys for children are the top concerns of toy companies around the world. Therefore, OLLI is determined to expand the Maika ecosystem to the international market.

For smart toys, OLLI will solve a bigger problem of AI, because products for children require stricter content censorship. Especially when distributed to the global market, there will be stricter requirements on safety information.

AI is creating a wave of innovation, but most consumers have not yet adapted, because AI has not been widely applied in daily life. The birth of ChatGPT in late 2022 has helped expand public awareness and interest in the power of AI. However, it is only strongly demonstrated in the field of office administration (such as word processing, information searching) and marketing, such as writing content, creating images, videos ...

With the advantage of mastering both AI technology and hardware devices, the founders of OLLI have quickly learned and applied the latest AI models to the current system to enhance the customer experience. In the software version with integrated ChatGPT, Maika speaker users have felt the superior power of AI when it can answer any information that users want to know, from science, history, geography, literature to spiritual life.

Technology has brought many great advances to society, but it has also reduced direct connections between people. The number of children with autism, hyperactivity, emotional and behavioral disorders, and vision loss due to addiction to smart devices with screens is increasing. Witnessing this situation, Ta Thanh Hai and his colleagues at OLLI are always struggling to find ways to create products that help children learn, play healthily, and reduce their dependence on phones.

The current Maika smart speaker and future Maika assistant-integrated toy devices promise to “liberate” children from phone screens. By practicing daily conversations with the Maika assistant, children will increase their ability to communicate and connect through sound and language with the world around them.

With Maika Vietnamese assistant, in addition to developing educational features to support children's learning such as spelling, dictation, English reading practice, quizzes..., OLLI also focuses on developing a content store with humanistic values ​​and is carefully censored with nearly 500 fairy tales, nearly 300 nursery rhymes and poems, hundreds of interesting sounds (animal sounds, vehicles, nature), helping to nurture children's emotional intelligence.

“We believe that if children are nurtured and watered with positive and good things during their childhood, they will grow up to have a happy and peaceful life. Perhaps, many parents still think that intelligence quotient completely determines a child's future success. But studies have shown that emotional intelligence quotient determines 80% of a child's success and happiness as an adult, while intelligence quotient only accounts for 20%,” Ta Thanh Hai analyzed.

In addition to the children's group, OLLI also cares about the spiritual life of the elderly, the unfortunate lives that have lost the light since birth or due to life events. That is the motivation for the OLLI team to develop features for controlling smart homes, calling, reminders, radio, news, podcasts, dharma talks, Buddhist scriptures...

Trust your companion

For the past 7 years, Hai has lived in the US, but has devoted full time to OLLI. As co-founders, Hai and Viet have a clear division of roles in operating and developing the Company. In the early stages, both developed the product. Later, Viet focused on production management, warehouse management, operational processes, and marketing; Hai focused on business, fundraising, finance, management, and recruitment.

“We both support and cover for each other. The most important thing is trust in each other. We have been close friends since 7th grade, went through middle school, high school and college together in the US, so we really understand and trust each other,” Hai shared.

However, the two co-founders still have differences. Viet is quite meticulous, detailed, analyzes everything carefully and is extremely intelligent and creative; Hai is reckless, enthusiastic because of his passion, but also very patient when needed and always curious to explore new things.

Recently, OLLI has raised capital from angel investors and is in the process of raising capital from domestic and foreign investment funds. The capital raising plan for the next rounds will be carefully considered, based on the profits generated by the Company, with clear purposes for expanding new product lines and accessing new markets.

“OLLI will not raise capital just for the sake of raising capital and having money, avoiding falling into a state of constant capital starvation due to facing the pressure of growing too quickly,” Hai affirmed.

According to Hai, to develop a sustainable company, it is necessary to have time to build internal capacity for the staff, have time for them to improve their capacity, along with the development of the company.

Hai admitted that building a platform like Maika is not easy. That is why there are only a few companies in the world that make their own assistants (before ChatGPT) such as: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Xiaomi XiaoAi, Alibaba Genie, KaKao AI. A purely Vietnamese startup name that has come this far, still maintaining the long-term strategy of bringing Vietnamese products to the world technology arena, is an affirmation of Vietnam's technological potential. In the future, those studies will contribute to marking the name of Vietnamese technology on the world technology map.

Source: https://baodautu.vn/businessman-ta-thanh-hai-dong-sang-lap-cong-ty-cong-nghe-olli-dua-ai-den-tung-ngoc-ngach-cuoc-song-nguoi-viet-d229540.html