

Itโs a humid Summer Thursday night in the heart of Tel Aviv, but not everyone is celebrating the end of a busy week. As the vibrant city nightlife hums in the distance, a high-pitched screech from my overheating laptop snaps me back into focus. I grind my bloodshot eyes to peek at the clockโโโItโs 3am. Iโm sitting at a communal table in a WeWork in the Southern part of the city. The light chatter and incessant clicking of other programmers in the room does little to calm my stress-induced migraine as I start to readjust the hyper-parameters of my speech summarization algorithm. I take a look to my right and see my teammate Dominik Hempel rubbing his eyes in exhaustion after spending nearly an hour on a Node.js server error that refuses to go away. On my left, Marcel Aphraim lets out an exasperated sigh after taking a final sip from his 4th cup of coffee. Our bodiesโโโand our mindsโโโare beginning to waver.
In less than 12 hours, we will deliver a functional product to a panel of judges consisting of the professional investors, successful founders, and the CTO of Bank Hapoalim. Yet despite the Gordian knot in front of us, our team prevails and walks away $2,000 richer.
Dominik, Marcel, and I participated in a competition called Hackathon.AI.
A โhackathonโ is a competition where small teams come together to build a solution to a problem in a very short time frame. Hackathons are generally supported by big name sponsors such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to showcase new technologies and encourage innovation within technical communities. With a large prize at stake and enough caffeine to fuel a small country, teams push themselves to their physical and mental limits in order to achieve an extraordinary amount of progress in a short amount of time. Although the effort can be exhausting, teams have the privilege of consulting professional mentors and industry experts to help guide them through the process.
OUR IDEA
Hackathon.AI was themed around building a product that implements AI, personal assistants, or chatbots. With this in mind, our team spent a lot of time debating and validating our ideas. Initially, we had a few ideas in mind:
If we didnโt know any better, we probably would have just jumped into one of these ideas without a second thought. But thanks to some of the lessons Dominik and I learned from Excel Ventures, we had some advantages over the competition in terms of strategic planning:
After some serious debate and discussion, we ended up abandoning our initial ideas. None of us knew, held or traded any Bitcoin, we found the use cases for quick responses highly limited, and we had no idea if stores seriously considered tracking their customersโ feelings.
Instead, we took a different approach and tackled a problem we all personally experiencedโโโgetting distracted during business meetings. Business meetings are common in large companies, but attendees rarely retain much of the information. Many meetings have a dedicated note-taker who summarizes the information, but hiring someone just to take notes is far from money well-spent.
Given recent advancements in artificial intelligence, we found this to be a specific pain point that could be innovated upon. So, we created Summit: a meeting-summarizing personal assistant that records and summarizes your meetings.
HOW WE TESTED
After validating Summit with several of the mentors, we realized that we had a solid idea to work with. We utilized several of the tools and API keys generously provided to us by the hackathon and began working on our product. First, we developed a Node web application used the Microsoft Cognitive Services API to provide speech transcriptions. Next, we implemented a Natural Language Processing algorithm to condense the summarized text by ranking important sentences.
PRESENTING THE VALUE
24 sleepless hours later, and the announcement comes that presentations are ready to begin. We just fixed the last bug 30 seconds prior. Despite hours of nonstop work, we only have 5 minutes to show off everything. The key to winning, however, is not to spend the entire time demonstrating your solution. Rather, the bulk of your time should be spent explaining the problem and why your solution uniquely solves it. Ultimately, your demo is a proof of concept.
For our presentation, we gave evidence that supported our claim that business meetings were highly inefficient without written summaries or transcripts. This was a problem we had all personally faced, but had confidence in this hypothesis since we had devoted a considerable amount of time discussing the idea with mentors as well as performing research.
For the demonstration itself, we showed examples of our product compressing lengthy conversations into easily legible paragraphs. Furthermore, we took the audio recording of the demo as we spoke and showed off the summarized results.
WHAT WE LEARNED
Needless to say, the judges were impressed by our solution and awarded us with a $2,000 prize. Despite the physical and mental toll the hackathon took on us, we were confident in ourselves because we took a critical yet sophisticated approach in designing our product. We knew that by putting the extra effort into validating the idea, we would be sitting on a winning solution. Afterwards, we spoke with one of the judges, the CTO of Bank Hapoalim, and he told us that if this were designed for Hebrew business meetings, he would have bought it on the spot.
To put things succinctlyโโโTo build a winning idea, think before you leap, but leap in a lot of different places.
Alex Reibman is a data scientist with a background in economics, cybersecurity, and innovation and has worked in Tel Avivโs high-tech sector for over a year. Alex graduated from Emory University in 2016 with a degree in Economics and Philosophy and was an Excel Ventures Fellow in 2016.
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