Several years ago Serenade co-founder Matt Wiethoff was a Quora developer when he was diagnosed with a severe repetitive stress injury to his hand and failed to program. He and co-founder Tommy MacWilliam decided to use artificial intelligence to create a tool that would allow him to pronounce the code and Serenade I was born.
Today, the company announced an initial investment of $ 2.1 million led by Amplify Partners and Neo. While it was there, the startup also announced the first commercial release of the product, Serenade Pro.
"Serenade is an app that you will download to your computer. It will connect to your existing editors like Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ, and then let you speak your code, "co-founder MacWilliam told me. At that point the startup's AI engine takes over and translates what you say into syntactically correct code.
He says that although there are a ton of generalized text-to-speech engines out there, they haven't been able to find anything that was tuned specifically to the requirements of someone entering the code. While it may appear that this has a rather narrow market focus, the co-founders see this use case simply as a starting point with developers using this type of technology even when they are not hurt.
"Our vision is that this is just the future of programming. With machine learning, coding becomes faster and easier than ever, and our AI eliminates many mechanical parts of programming. So, instead of having to remember the keyboard shortcuts or syntax details of a language, you can just focus on expressing your idea naturally, and then our machine learning will take care of translating it into real code for you, "he explained. MacWilliam.
The startup now has five employees, but plans to take the company to 15-20 in the next year fueled by the introduction of the commercial product and the new financing. As they build the company, MacWilliam says being different is an important part of this.
"Our diversity strategy varies throughout the process. I think it starts at the top of the funnel. We need to make sure we go out and reach out and reach great people - there are great people everywhere and it's up to us to find and convince them why working at Serenade would be great, "he said. They are working with a variety of sources to find a diverse group of candidates that go beyond the their personal network, then examine how they interview and judge candidates' skills with the goal of building a more diverse employee base.
The company sees itself as a way to go beyond the keyboard to speak your code and intends to use this money to continue building the product while building a community of dedicated users. "We will think about how to show the value of coding with voice, how we can put together demos and build a community of product samples to prove it. [it's faster to code using your voice], "He said.
