The adventure of Vulcan Coalition began in 2020 when our two co-founders, one is an expert in the AI industry, the other in people with disabilities (PWDs), met and shared their experiences with each other. They both then discovered opportunities to solve the pain points of their own working fields. Nowadays, the AI industry in Thailand is lacking in data labelling workers while lots of Thai PWDs are still looking for employment. Thus, Vulcan Coalition was founded with the objective of both developing new innovative AI technologies and improving the quality of life of PWDs.
In Thailand, there are approximately 820,000 PWDs of working age. However, only 30% of them have a job, while 70% or around 500,000 PWDs remain unemployed and must rely on a monthly disability allowance which is, unfortunately, not sufficient to cover their basic costs of living. One of the main reasons for this high unemployment rate is a slight understanding of PWDs’ conditions and limitations which causes the difficulty to find them decent jobs.
According to neuroscience research, we surprisingly found that some PWDs have special abilities that would help them work faster than non-PWDs. For example, blind people have a better hearing perception than sighted people due to their brain rewiring phenomenon which enhances their auditory sensory to compensate for the visual loss. In other words, blind people are able to work in the audio section more productively than general workers on the condition that they are provided with appropriate assistance allowing them to show their full potential.
Regarding the AI industry, although it is now rapidly growing, this technology still needs numerous data in order to improve its quality and efficiency. As a result, the position of data labeller (aka AI trainer) is highly demanded in this field to produce various forms of high-quality training data, such as voice, image and text, for the AI machine learning process.
Therefore, Vulcan Coalition aims to bring solutions to these 2 fields by using the strengths of the other. We offer career opportunities in data labelling to PWDs, not because of our feeling of sympathy, but because of their high working potential. This model will not only allow PWDs to earn income and improve their quality of life but also develop AI innovation and drive the AI industry further.
After up to 2 years, we have currently around 600 PWDs working as an AI trainer and also 90% of our team are disabled which makes Vulcan Coalition become the first tech company working with the most PWDs in Thailand. And thanks to this talented team, Vulcan Coalition is holding the most labeled voice dataset in Thai language, moreover Vulcan plans to launch this year following products:
– AI Depression detection program for our quota partner
– AI Home Automation in Thai Language for real estate company
– AI text-to-speech for Audio Books in the Library for the blind
– Data Labeling service for corporate and private sector and many more…
This Vulcan‘s ecosystem model not only benefits the AI industry in developing new innovations for both our society and economy, but it also creates a valuable career for PWDs and improves their quality of life. With their earned income, some of our PWDs have become a household of the family, some could finish their studies and some have been able to pay off their debt.
Additionally, apart from the fact that we’ve provided them career opportunities, Vulcan Coalition also offers various upskilling programs as we aim to equip essential skills, both for working and living, to PWDs in order to advance their professional growth and to ensure that they will not be excluded from the labor market during this digital transformation century.