The Afforai application, which supports many features such as reading and translating English text into Vietnamese or using Vietnamese commands to write English text and 100 other languages, has just received investment from a venture capital company in the US.
Afforai software was founded by two Vietnamese students studying in the US, Nguyen Tuong Anh and Nguyen Khac Hung, who graduated from Lawrence University. This is a tool to help students and office workers read and write documents faster.
Like Chat GPT technology, Afforai chatbot uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to filter data to provide accurate knowledge. The tool is expected to help research everything quickly and easily.
Users just need to enter information on any topic from any field, any language, Afforai will summarize and return the knowledge closest to the request.
"What Google does with information, we do with knowledge," Nguyen Tuong Anh told VnExpress . The difference is that instead of reading 1,000 pages of a book, users just need to upload a document, request to search for important information, and the artificial intelligence software will immediately provide answers as well as lead to each page and paragraph of the source text.
Two founding members of Afforai, Nguyen Khac Hung (left) and Nguyen Tuong Anh. Photo: NVCC
Tuong Anh shared that everything was difficult at the beginning, when both of them struggled to operate the company with the savings earned during 4 years of studying in the US. The opportunity opened up when an investor in the US decided to invest 2.5 billion VND, motivating them to continue pursuing the project and perfecting the technology.
Tuong Anh is in charge of financial management and investment fundraising, while Hung develops technology, creates new features, and improves AI. After more than 6 months, the team successfully developed AI software that can understand long documents such as information from websites, pdf, docx with the ability to understand context up to 100,000 words or 500 pages. The software has outstanding advantages such as having a separate support feature in Vietnamese, and the ability to download text and respond in many different languages.
According to the author, many users commented that Afforai "looks like ChatGPT", but in reality the usage value is completely different. Afforai's breakthrough helps interact with text with high accuracy. Afforai was created to serve the needs of students, researchers, and corporate teams that need to research and update information with high accuracy.
By developing software for Vietnamese people, the team hopes that AI innovations that are popular in developed countries will be easily accessible in developing countries. Currently, Afforai has more than 2,000 users. The application was voted the 4th most popular product on Product Hunt, received an investment of 100,000 USD (about 2.5 billion VND) from Sputnik ATX VC, a venture capital firm in the US, and was accepted into the 1871 Chicago startup program.
Tuong Anh said that users can access the application, register for an account and use it for free for 50 questions, then there will be long-term subscription packages if needed.
The app answers a summary of the user's question and suggests additional reading material. Screenshot
Dr. Le Duy Tan, International University, VNU-HCM, assessed that there are currently many AI Chatbots such as ChatGPT of OpenAI, Google Bard of Google, Llama2 of Meta, Qwen-VL-Chat of Alibaba, or ChatPDF - an AI chatbot with some similar features to Afforai, but the Vietnamese language support of these AI chatbots still needs improvement. "The efforts of young people to build a Vietnamese AI Chatbot to serve Vietnamese people are very much appreciated," he said.
Dr. Tan graduated with a PhD in Computer Networks and Security from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), and is also a founding member of the AIoT Lab VN Research Department. From a professional perspective, Dr. Tan assessed that to use Afforai, users need to upload text to the system, so developers need to pay attention to and publicize the method of encrypting and storing user text to ensure user information security. In addition, the naturalness and grammar of the answers are also issues that need to be improved over time.
Nhu Quynh
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