ELSA SELECTED AS HONOREE IN AI AND DATA CATEGORY

New York, April 28, 2020 — The winners of Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honoring the businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to flattening the curve when it comes to the climate crisis, social injustice, or economic inequality.

With its exceptional development and contributions in leveraging data and AI to empower change throughout the world, ELSA was recognized as the World Changing Ideas 2020.

ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) is an AI-powered app that aims to help the 1.5 billion language learners around the world to learn to speak English more fluently, thereby changing their careers and lives. ELSA uses proprietary speech technology with deep learning and AI to detect people’s pronunciation mistakes with 95%+ accuracy. ELSA is used by many universities, professional English training programs and secondary schools in the US and internationally.

Now in its fourth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 26 winners, more than 200 finalists, and more than 500 honorable mentions—with Health and Wellness, Corporate Social Responsibility, and AI and Data among the most popular categories. A panel of eminent judges selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 3,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more. The 2020 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Vancouver to Singapore to Tel Aviv.

“I’ve never been more proud of our amazing team at ELSA – we are recognized in Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards 2020 in the AI and Data category, out of nearly 3,000 entries. Leveraging data and AI to make a positive impact in the world is at our core, and we are so honored to play our part, and especially in times like these, where online learning and equal access to education becomes even more important”, says Vu Van, founder & CEO of  ELSA.

“There seems no better time to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, resources, and, in some cases, their scale to tackle society’s biggest problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have uncovered some of the smartest and most inspiring projects of the year.”

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World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With a goal of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.