Presenter:
Alex Dunn, Founder and CEO of Enabled Play.
Startup:
Enabled Play* levels the playing field for people with disabilities by giving them new ways to control their technology that works for them.
*Please note Enabled Play will soon be rebranding.
Transcript
[00:00 – 01:26] Alex
Hi, I’m Alex Dunn, the founder of Enabled Play, the platform that integrates personalised and accessible controls to help brands reach and support more customers of all abilities.
We got started building AI-augmented controls because in 2020, my brother Bryan was trying to keep up with his friends while playing video games, but he was getting left behind. And as an AI engineer and former founder, I knew there had to be a simple fix for this, a new way to communicate with devices and software that adapt to the individual rather than pushing them to depend on hardware that isn’t accessible or equitable to them. And it got us thinking.
Because the truth is that over 600 million people globally cannot access technology because simple software is not designed for their accessibility needs. Here in the US, that’s nearly one in five Americans. And as 91% of businesses now expect their customers to engage with their business in a software-first platform, it means they’re leaving behind 600 million potential customers. As an example, for one of our customers, a Fortune 50 bank, they estimate that there is more than 12 million unbanked or underbanked prospect customers in the US alone who cannot become their customer because their applications are not accessible. That’s money that they, and anyone else who is trying to reach more customers, is leaving on the table. In fact, we estimate that enterprise businesses are leaving on average $33 billion in revenue by not building for accessibility.
So we built Enabled Play, a personalised set of controls for users that let them augment and automate their technology with voice controls, face expressions, body gestures, motion controls, virtual buttons and more.
[01:37 – 01:41] Computer
New slide. Type this is my new title.
[01:41 – 02:30] Alex
It’s a platform that adapts to each user’s abilities using the latest innovations in AI and machine learning. Even more importantly, it can also operate entirely offline, so your voice and video is never recorded, it’s never streamed and it’s never shared beyond the device you’re using. Finally, it allows each user to bring their personalised profiles and preferences to each app, game and service they want to control, which means businesses don’t have to find the right way to support each unique user’s needs and preferences. They’ve already been empowered to do that for themselves and can bring those preferences and controls directly to your apps, games, websites and services. It also provides a new surface for your business’s services to be discovered, too.
We recently finished raising our seed investment round and are not looking for additional investors at this point, but we’re eager to meet with heads of accessibility, DE&I and technology working at companies that are eager to discover how, through a simple software integration with our platform, they can gain access to hundreds of millions of new users, too.
