Mycroft is partnering with WorkAround — a microwork platform that provides employment and a living wage to refugees and displaced persons — for the tagging of Precise wake word samples.

When I arrived at the MassChallenge Boston accelerator in June of 2017, I quickly got to know a number of the companies in our batch. There was paddle boarding with Finnest on the Charles River, being on TV with CareAline and Veripad, and hiking with the teams of Clevot, Etiquette, Tot-em, and Cloudboost. Spending a summer in Boston with some top startups is hard to beat and I did my best to introduce myself around the MassChallenge space and get to know the other companies and their founders.

Thanks to that, in September when Mycroft was looking at the tens of thousands of wake word samples we were collecting from our Opted-In community members, and considering using Mechanical Turk to accelerate their tagging, I was able to raise my hand and say “We can do better than MTurk.” That was because I had taken a Lyft once from the MassChallenge building with Wafaa Arbash of WorkAround, who introduced me to her co-founder Jennie Kelly.

WorkAround is an online microwork platform that provides work opportunities to the 65 million displaced people in the world. Many of these are well-educated people with a smartphone or computer and internet access, but who may not be able to work in their trained professions while displaced from their homelands. Barely a year old, WorkAround has already provided work to over 250 displaced people in 7 different countries, their “WorkArounders.” Director of Operations and Finance Jennie Kelly notes,