As part of our recent DeepL AI Labs launch we also have been talking about our culture and the Hack-Fridays.
For many years, we’ve run Hack Fridays, a set day each month when we encourage DeepL’s employees to focus an entire day on a value-driving initiative outside of their day-to-day activity. We’ve designed Hack Fridays around the principle of innovating with purpose, asking tech team members and other employees to submit plans in advance and make sure that the time they invest delivers a tangible outcome. These Hacks regularly involve DeepL teams building prototypes for new features, experimenting with new technologies that they can bring to their work, and improving our internal tools.
The themes that we ask DeepHack participants to focus tie directly to the areas we’re exploring in DeepL AI Labs, ranging from improving workflows through natural language understanding, to delivering operational intelligence for enterprise organizations, developing multilingual voice experiences, and more. These events have already produced breakthrough innovations applying our AI platform in exciting new ways – including generating prototypes for real-time voice cloning models that can help enable authentic voice-to-voice translation, tools for direct editing of translated PDFs, and integrations of DeepL into the social platform, BlueSky.
We also love to be part of other Hackathons and similar events.
This year, we sponsored Hack for Impact events in San Francisco and New York City, where developers prototyped language-driven solutions for the public good. At one MCP Hackathon, which we co-sponsored with AWS, the winning prototype was a multilingual, voice-activated disaster response system that used DeepL to make critical information accessible in any language.
What do you think? Do you love Hackathons? Want to join our Hackathon if we ever open it up to the public?