“The choice to self-develop in the area of information technologies was a decision that allowed me to bring almost all of my interests together,” says Yasmina, one of the representatives of the Xabarchi team that got awarded a prize-winning place in Voice AI hackathon. “Since childhood, I dreamed of becoming an architect because I’ve always been fascinated with creativity and design, and my grandmother nurtured in me an appreciation for mathematics and physics.” Nevertheless, the 21st century - the age of technology - offers unique opportunities for young people to solve real problems with the help of technologies. Currently, Yasmina, a third-year student at the School of Computer and Information Engineering of INHA University, skillfully utilizes her interest in design, as well as her skills to create user-friendly interfaces for digital products.

Maftuna, another member of the team who studies with Yasmina, has been interested in programming since high school. When at school she developed a basic application that won an IT competition for girls, Technovation, which led her to make a conscious choice to specialize in IT. Now, Maftuna is a backend developer who develops the software and administrative sections of web applications.

“I have always admired my father, and he is a programmer,” said Muhammadsaid, yet another team member. That explains why he’s been interested in programming ever since he was a child. Currently, this young man is engaged in several personal digital projects.

“During a lecture a while back, our professor told us about a hackathon to develop digital solutions using voice data in Uzbek language and artificial intelligence,” – that’s how according to Maftuna they learned about the hackathon. This hackathon is a platform that brings together designers, developers and other professionals to lay groundwork for a network of active people interested in solving the proposed challenge. Our participants have become a part of this network.

The primary objective of Voice AI hackathon was to promote artificial intelligence technology among the talented and creative youth of Uzbekistan, as well as to select promising projects based on voice data in the Uzbek language for further implementation.

“For us, the first day of the hackathon turned out to be a time of experiments: we came up with completely new ideas, shared them with specialists from different fields, radically changed them, chose new directions and developed them for further implementation in the project. That’s how the idea of our project drew its first breath,” says Yasmina.

The news aggregator, developed by the participants, is a program that displays a structured news feed. It connects to the news feeds of various Uzbek media and selects news according to specified criteria (filter, keywords, dates), and offers the reader an adequate personalized selection of news. One of the advantages of the application is the mode of voiceover in Uzbek language supported by artificial intelligence.

“I remember the hackathon as a platform for creativity and collaboration,” recalls Muhammadsaid, “it gave us a unique opportunity to work in a free-flowing, convenient format, with specialists from different fields, to exchange knowledge, ideas and experience.” “We quickly learned new things and immediately put what we learned into effect for our startup project,” adds Yasmina. Indeed, Xabarchi team, a newcomer to the hackathon, created a new idea that has become a successful example of the use of technology in developing an inclusive digital solution.

Inspired by their victory, the team members set new goals for themselves. Muhammadsaid is already engaged in new projects to develop competent spellcheckers in Uzbek language by designing plug-ins for MS Word, Chrome, as well as mobile applications and keyboards. Maftuna admits that after the hackathon, she developed a couple of business ideas and her aspiration is to implement them. For the time being she’s immersed into learning both technology and doing business. Yasmina believes that education without an MA degree is far from complete and plans to further study technology, artificial intelligence and STEM.

Hackathon was organized by UNDP in Uzbekistan on December 24-26, 2021 in cooperation with the Ministry for the Development of Information Technologies and Communications of the Republic of Uzbekistan, IT-Park, INHA University in Tashkent, as well as the Research Institute for the Development of Digital Technologies and Artificial Intelligence. This was the first AI hackathon in Uzbekistan. Importantly, this hackathon was possible due to the creation of the first digital dataset of Uzbek voice as part of Mozilla Foundation’s Common Voice initiative. From August to December 2021, UNDP Uzbekistan jointly with IT-Park, private sector and volunteers conducted a crowdsourcing campaign (https://uzbekvoice.ai/) to collect 193 hours of voice data in Uzbek, which is available through an open API for anyone to implement voice-to-text and other solutions.