An international video pitching competition supported by the British Council, the Big Idea Challenge, aims to encourage young people from the Creative Spark program countries to develop an innovative startup and tell the world about it.
This year, 54 applications were received from Kazakhstan in three categories: Social Impact, Creativity, and Digital Technology.
Edige Akimali’s “Soyles” project is a mobile sign language translation app. According to the student, they plan to create an initial model within six months under the guidance of a London Metropolitan University Accelerator mentor.
“The core idea is to use computer vision to translate sign language into text or audio through the mobile phone camera. A mobile app will be accessible without implemented advertisements. Our voice and text will be converted into a video with sign language. There are similar projects around the world, such as the Brazilian startup “Hand Talk App”, which won support from Google. But it translates only text into sign language but cannot work in the opposite direction. I will not say this idea will be the first, but we want to make it the most convenient,” said Edige Akimali.
The creative Spark program is a five-year initiative that helps youth to build enterprise skills and an innovative economy across seven countries in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan), South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia), and Ukraine. Young people between 18 and 35 years old are eligible to participate individually or in teams. The winner is determined in three categories: Social Impact, Creativity, and Digital technologies.
