Who am I ?
Syrine bouslama, from Sousse Tunisia , Data scientist and Epitomi co-founder.
Why did I start working on Epitomi?
Since my early age, I was fascinated by new technologies especially the magic of robots and electronic devices. This is why I have oriented early my career to become an electronic engineer.
During my years of study, I was disappointed of the way most of my friends and classmates choose their education and career path : they choose their studies without taking in consideration their passion neither the trend of the labor market and most of them end up by being depressed and not finding a suitable job for them . Also, I noticed how many people seeking vocational retraining and I believed even more in the hypothesis that professional orientation needs urgent intervention.
This is so problematic in our country since we have been taught to be engineers or doctors to have a respectful social status and be able to make a good leaving .
But aren’t we are not we living in a world with a endless possibilities and an abundant numbers of opportunities ? so can we we can take a leaving and follow our passion ?
Since my graduation I started asking these questions, how is it possible to help people find the right path in their education and career while following their passion and taking into consideration their personalities? So I ended up concluding that this problem is a combination between the tunisian mentality mind and the lack of pedagogical guidance and support that can help young people through the process of orientation and raise their awareness about making the right choice to choose their careers so we can prevent the next generation of being passive and unmotivated.
How to address this problem ?
Driven by my desire to change things around me and serve my community while working on things that I love and believe in, I started looking for solutions to help young people better choose their education while taking into consideration their passion and the evolution of the label market . This is how I started working on Epitomi: an intelligent platform that offer a customized assistance for young people to better choose their career path and education and raise awareness about employment in the future.
Our ambition
My ambition is to make Epitomi an intelligent platform that is able to recommend careers and education paths and guide young minds to a better future. We can achieve that for the users by gathering all the information about private and public universities and training centers. I would love to make it easy for people having difficulties finding the career which best suits them to choose a job that matches their profile and personality and get well prepared to the professional world.
Where are we now?
With the help of a psychiatrist specialized in university orientation, we have developed a set of questions to feed our bot. In this test phase, the analysis of the users answers will be done manually. Later, this collected data will then be used as a database to train our chat bot (as you may know to train a model we need a huge amount of data).
I developed myself the mvp of our Epitomi chatbot on messenger and now we are focused on testing it on real bachelor students. So, we launched a Facebook page and we are doing our best to make people discover our product so we can have their feedback about the effectiveness and the need of our service.
Next step?
We had an agreement in principle with a student network implanted in more than 25 university institutions to test our chatbot and this will help us evaluate the relevance of the questions and see if the analysis of the answers will be a good starting point to build a training data set.
Want to join Epitomi ?
Since Ameni and I, the cofounders, are both engineers, we welcome people who want to join to help in marketing and community building.
We really appreciate if there are community members who had similar experience with chatbots and collecting text data to share with us their experience and how they managed to collect data.
Wherever you are, if you feel like we do need such a solution in your country let’s have a chat!