Jon Goldsmith and Nikolas Liolio of Tetra

It all started as a hobby for Phillips Exeter Academy students Jon Goldsmith and Nikolas Liolio. Putting together simple machine-learning models, expanding on them, advancing them with higher-level algorithms. It was good, educating fun for the both of them as they approached their high school graduation and would be heading off to college, but then another opportunity arose. Jon and Nik saw the opportunity to take one of their side projects and incubate it into a major, ground-breaking idea. They were working on various programs that took machine-learning and implemented it into voice recognition and translation, something that has been rising in the tech world for the past few years. However, their idea was a little different than that of the self-translating earbuds or just simple speech-to-text.

They wanted to implement artificial intelligence inside a voice-translation phone app and have the app take down notes specific to each person for later review. Thus, Ask Tetra was born. Ask Tetra, mostly referred to as just Tetra, implements a personal, as well as business, phone app that takes a recording throughout any call and transcribes what was said by each party of the call. Though the base of this idea had been flushed out across many different platforms over the past couple years, Tetra did something very unique to the whole conference call environment. Tetra actively used its AI capabilities to scrub through the transcripts to suggest highlights throughout the call, to ensure all the important talking points can be remembered and referenced later on. In this way, Tetra allows for conference calls to not have to be a constant overlapping of people talking, and people missing out on key information that then either needs to be repeated constantly, or simply forgotten all together.

Jon and Nik should be viewed as models of the new-age entrepreneur. They are young, open-minded individuals who took one of their shared passions, gave it some time to develop, and then took a leap into the industry of consumer tech with their new, ground-breaking idea. Jon and Nik have been able to amass quite a number of backers and investors to keep their idea growing and their company expanding. What once started off as a two man project has now grown to roughly a thirty man operation worth over $1 million , and is working harder now than ever to implement their innovative tech with the web communication giants of today’s world.