Social Impact Tech: Joseph Lee of InnoCaption On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
Our mobile app provides a seamless mobile phone calling experience for the deaf and hard of hearing community through real-time captioning generated by highly trained stenographers or automated speech recognition software. Our solution is unique in that we empower our users to choose between these two captioning methodologies (live assistance or fully automated) anytime during their call. Using InnoCaption’s real-time captioning technology, our users can communicate independently and effectively, without needing to disclose to others that they have a hearing loss.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Joseph Lee.
Joseph Lee is the Co-CEO at InnoCaption, a company he founded in early 2007 after reading that approximately 10% of the U.S. population had some form of hearing loss. After serving in the Korean military as a First Lieutenant, Joseph immigrated to the US in 1989 while working for Samsung, where he gained his expertise in mobile phone and telecommunications. Since 2007, Joseph has been using this extensive knowledge to lead InnoCaption by serving the deaf and hard of hearing community. He’s seen first-hand the kind of impact InnoCaption has on others and says there is no more rewarding a career as one where growing a business successfully means improving the quality of life for others.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I was part of the post-war generation in South Korea. My childhood was spent in a country that was rebuilding itself after the devastating Korean War, at a time when there was a lot of emphasis on hard work and sacrificing for the greater good of the country. Although South Korea is now a relatively wealthy country and a global technology leader, it was a poor and developing nation when I was growing up. Most homes still had outhouses, our schools burned coal inside to keep warm in winter, and some children even worked in clothing factories to support their families. I was very fortunate in that I was able to receive a proper education and eventually attended college. After college, I served in the Korean military as a first lieutenant leading a platoon and after that I began my corporate career with Samsung Group and emigrated to the US to aid the company’s early years of international expansion. To this day, these early experiences really help me keep things in perspective and allow me to be thankful for all that I have in my life today.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Although I wasn’t an engineer by training, I’ve always had a deep interest in technology. When I first entered the corporate world in the early 80’s, personal computers were imported to South Korea for the first time by large conglomerates who were the only ones that could afford such expensive, high-tech equipment. Our floor at the Samsung office had two such computers imported from Japan. These two NEC computers were to be shared amongst over 50 staff, most of whom had no idea what the devices were for or how to use them. I was fascinated by these incredible machines which could crunch through complex calculations on spreadsheets containing a whopping 256 rows of data! However, as a fresh recruit I was expected to be at my desk all day so the only way for me to access these devices was when nobody else was around. For months I arrived at the office an hour earlier than everyone else and spent my mornings tinkering away, teaching myself how these futuristic machines worked. Eventually, senior colleagues realized what I could do and began coming to me with projects that could utilize computer spreadsheets for the first time. This resulted in a lot of late nights for me, working on spreadsheet models and processing documents, but also solidified my lifelong interest in technology.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Joe Duarte is my co-CEO at InnoCaption and initially got involved with the business as an angel investor. We would not have been able to launch our service and get to where we are today without his enthusiastic support. Joe was an absolute believer in our service since the day he discovered our booth at a conference in 2012 where we showcased our prototype app. Joe, who received his first hearing aid at age four, is an engineer by training and someone who is always seeking better and better technology solutions. His feedback and input into our app and service was immensely helpful in preparing us for public release. In addition, Joe’s extensive advocacy and involvement in the deaf and hard of hearing community was integral to building our credibility and support at the FCC for our certification process. Overall, Joe has been a great business partner to work with and we have built a great degree of personal trust over the years.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There is an old idiom in Korea about life being like an old man’s horse, which I have always taken to heart throughout the ups and downs of my professional journey. The idiom refers to a story about an old man who had a horse. One day the horse ran away and the villagers came to console him but he calmly replied “who can tell if this will turn out to be a blessing…”. Then one day his horse returned with a wild mare and all of the villagers came to congratulate the old man on his good fortune, to which he simply replied “who can tell if this will turn out to be a curse…”. Soon after, the old man’s son was thrown off the wild mare while trying to tame her and broke his leg. All the villagers came to send their condolences, but once again the old man remained calm. Then a war broke out and all the young men in the village were conscripted and many perished, while the old man’s son was allowed to remain home due to his injury. This story reminds us that when we are going through difficult times, we should not fall into despair, but rather continue to work diligently to achieve our goals because even the most challenging events in our lives may prove to be great blessings in the future.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Resilience Through Hardships
Serving as an officer in the Korean military after college provided me with ample opportunities to build leadership skills and to practice tenacity in the face of physical and mental hardships. When faced with challenges, I could always think back to my military days and know that if I could get through tear gas chambers and endless overnight marches in full gear, I could also overcome whatever difficulties I faced professionally. For example, InnoCaption was founded in 2007 and the financial crisis that followed shortly after led to significant hardships on our fledgling team as startup funding evaporated and our initial business contracts were put on hold. It really took all the motivation and courage we could muster to keep ourselves going and to stick to our vision, but we prevailed in the end because we did not give up and we marched on.
Building Personal Relationships
I believe strongly in building long-lasting personal relationships and loyalty with friends and colleagues alike. I was able to bring together the founding team at InnoCaption by drawing on personal relationships across different businesses and teams I had worked with prior to raising any significant capital for our startup. The team agreed to work for me not because I was able to offer big compensation packages, but because I was able to convey a shared vision that was built on a high degree of personal trust. The founding team’s family-like loyalty to each other was crucial in enabling us to survive the ups and downs of the initial years as a budding startup.
Strategic Decision Making
I would not consider myself to be a fast and decisive decision maker — I often need to sleep on and contemplate major decisions. However, I also do not hesitate to make bold or risky moves when I do decide it is necessary. I believe this balance has served me well in guiding the direction of our business so far, which has gone through some major pivots and changes over time. For example, when we first began developing InnoCaption, we tried working with major wireless carriers to embed our service onto their devices because this was the only way to get software on a phone at the time. However, when I saw the release of the first-gen iPhone, I began to see that the future of mobile phone technology would quickly shift away from a reliance on carriers to an app-based ecosystem. With that vision in mind, we shifted our strategic direction to independently develop a carrier-agnostic mobile app-based service, which served us well as the mobile landscape quickly evolved.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Tens of millions of Americans have some degree of hearing loss and for many of these people, communicating on a phone can be a real challenge. Effective telephonic communication is essential in today’s world, whether it is for work, for healthcare needs, or to stay in touch with loved ones. We have found that the development of accessible telecommunications solutions for the deaf and hard of hearing community tend to lag significantly behind what is available for general consumers. At InnoCaption, our mission is to provide the best telecommunications accessibility technology for the deaf and hard of hearing community by utilizing the latest technological advances available.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Our mobile app provides a seamless mobile phone calling experience for the deaf and hard of hearing community through real-time captioning generated by highly trained stenographers or automated speech recognition software. Our solution is unique in that we empower our users to choose between these two captioning methodologies (live assistance or fully automated) anytime during their call. Using InnoCaption’s real-time captioning technology, our users can communicate independently and effectively, without needing to disclose to others that they have a hearing loss.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
When I was still working as a telecom executive prior to launching InnoCaption, I was really taken aback by a statistic that showed approximately 10% of the US population had some form of hearing loss. Having spent decades as an immigrant in the US, I relied heavily on international phone calls to stay in touch with family in South Korea and I began to think about how difficult it would be to lose that vital communication channel due to hearing loss. Working in the mobile communication industry, I was also seeing first-hand the rapid adoption of mobile phones and how it was driving a global change in the way our society communicates on a daily basis. However, I didn’t see much attention being paid on how the development of mobile phone technology was going to be implemented from an accessibility perspective. This initial inspiration led me to conceive of and develop the InnoCaption service along with our founding team of engineers who had created patented technology that could help solve these communication barriers.
How do you think this might change the world?
There are so many causes of hearing loss and it is a condition that affects people of all ages and backgrounds. At the same time, the world is becoming more closely intertwined through various technologies and telephonic communication is an integral channel for connecting people. With the continued development of telecommunications technologies such as ours, my hope is that people will never have to worry about hearing loss affecting their livelihood, ability to get medical care or stay connected with friends and family.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
One technological concern that we share as a team here at InnoCaption is the rapid advent of automated speech recognition and the impact it could have on accessibility if adopted too quickly. When our real-time captioning service was started, we only offered one method of captioning — live stenographers. When we launched InnoCaption, we had also researched automated speech recognition (ASR) technology but found the performance to be underwhelming at the time. However, over the past five years there have been great advances in speech recognition technology, especially with the growing interest in smart home devices. Considering this development, in 2019 we began allowing our users to select between a live stenographer or ASR technology at the start of call and in 2020 we added the ability for users to switch modes mid-call. Since integrating these two captioning methodologies into our service, we have found that each captioning mode has its strengths. ASR is consistently fast but struggles at times with certain accents and speakers. On the other hand, our stenographers bring their human understanding and context into their captioning to help identify multiple speakers or to provide our users with non-verbal cues, such as indicating the other person is laughing. Our team strongly believes in continuing to offer this dual captioning feature for our users because we understand its importance from first-hand conversations with our users. However, we do worry that rapid adoption of ASR technology in live captioning, without full consideration of its limitations, could be detrimental to the accessibility needs of the deaf and hard of hearing community.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1 . As an entrepreneur, look for areas where technology is evolving rapidly but applications geared towards social causes may not be keeping pace. When InnoCaption publicly launched its service in 2016 and entered the captioned telephone market, we were the only provider to offer a mobile app solution across Android and iOS devices. All of our competitors at the time were primarily focused on landline devices, even though a majority of the US population already owned a smartphone by then.
2. To create new technology solutions, seek out expertise from outside industries or different geographies. In developing InnoCaption’s initial technology base, I drew from my network in the South Korean mobile telecom industry because the next-gen mobile communications infrastructure there had been deployed earlier than the United States and so I was able to leverage the expertise of engineers who had patented technology, which became useful for developing our real-time captioning solution.
3. Understand people’s challenges at a personal level. Much of my time in the early years of launching our service was spent meeting with users, understanding their frustrations and how we could better address them, and even visiting those that I could in person to help troubleshoot their devices. These personal interactions helped me build a full understanding of the challenges that our user community faced and to this day I still stay in touch with many of our early users who have provided us with invaluable feedback over the years on how to improve our service.
4. Find people who are also passionate about your cause. Joe Duarte, my co-CEO and early angel investor, was a perfect business partner for me because of his personal passion for providing accessible telecommunications to the deaf and hard of hearing community. This meant that he not only contributed financial capital for our business, he also helped craft our corporate culture of advocacy and putting the needs of our user community first and foremost.
5. Keep a close eye on bigger technology trends to best position yourself for industry shifts in the future. InnoCaption’s initial pivot from developing wireless carrier embedded software to an independent mobile app was a critical move that was guided by seeing longer term consumer trends that were only beginning to emerge at the time. Our early research into automated speech recognition technology was also integral in building up our understanding of this new technology, allowing us to quickly integrate it into our service as soon as we felt it was appropriate to do so.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Our daily work takes up a lot of our lives and our career path often becomes an integral part of our self-identity. If you don’t enjoy your work and you don’t believe in the mission that you are a part of, it is difficult to wake up and be excited to start the day. On the other hand, when you are part of a company or organization that succeeds only when you help improve the lives of other people, your professional and personal experience ends up becoming far more rewarding and fruitful each day. You also end up building strong personal relationships with others who share your cause and can become life-long resources to one another. I think that many young people these days do seem to prioritize the mission and values of companies they look to join, and I want to reaffirm to them that this is a wise choice.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would love to share a meal with a technology entrepreneur named Steve Kim. I read an article about Steve years back and was really inspired by his American Dream story as a fellow Korean immigrant born in the post-war generation, who became a self-made technology entrepreneur. Steve founded two companies and his second business called Xylan was successfully listed on the Nasdaq exchange and later sold for $2 billion in 1999. He then became a venture capital investor and educator for young entrepreneurs of the future. His story may not be as well-known as many other technology founders today, but I very much admire what he has been able to accomplish and also how he spent his time following his entrepreneurial success..
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I am personally not an avid user of social media, but my work with InnoCaption is well publicized and communicated by our marketing team through our Company’s various social media channels. I would encourage you to follow us on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn to keep up to date with our team and our work.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Joseph Lee of InnoCaption On How Their Technology Will Make An Important… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.