Hello, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar Vets welcoming you to our next podcast, and we're so fortunate today to have Sean Wilkie all the way over from Halifax, not Halifax, Yorkshire, but Halifax, Nova Scotia, who is the CEO of Talker 2, and he's gonna tell us a little bit about that later on, but . Sean, you, you've had a great background in the digital space in, in tech. You've now got interested in, in veterinary, but perhaps tell us a little bit about your backstory and what you've been getting up to over the last few years.

Yeah, great. Thank you. Well, Anthony, listen, I'm, I'm super happy to be here.

Thanks so much for inviting me to the show. And yeah, I guess, I, I guess we have to rewind the clock quite a ways. We gotta go back to 1999.

In 1999, I started my first technology company, a company called Robotnik, and that company started to kind of help consumers, was where it really had its roots in consumers and students access technology in an affordable way. You know, we started with a a counter, we had lineups around the corner for people to come by computer hardware. And that was my kind of first foray into business and into tech.

Fast forward, you know, kind of to the early 2000s, that company had been transformed into a a a man, a managed service provider, kind of helping businesses, some veterinary clinics, some medical clinics and and a lot of other companies in Atlantic Canada. Which is where I'm from, the other side of the pond, help them with their technology, you know, and, and technology is, is, has been an interesting thing, you know, when we started selling computers, you know, it's typical for a business to have one of them, you know, and it was a computer. And then, you know, that computer grew to 2 and then 5 and then everybody had 1 and then everybody had 2 and a mobile device.

And so I've really been on that journey with businesses kind of helping them adopt technology from the from the late 90s, up until last year when I sold that company. And along the way, I built a software company, I built a, a, a company that worked with Google to deploy their services like Gmail and Google Calendar to the masses. And so I've had this interesting journey around, you know, technology specifically, but then it's zoomed in and and helped people like either implement or even in some cases develop their own software, but I had never really started my own software company until about 4 years, OK, I guess it was about 5 years ago, when I partnered with Nuance Communication to resell their product, and through doing that, I discovered, you know, this opportunity, you know, after, after the company dragon veterinary, after I sold that company, I, you know, I had some time, some downtime, and I thought to myself, you know what, I think I might be able to do this better.

And that's when I hired my first couple of developers and set off, you know, around 2 years ago, to create Takatu and oh my, what a journey it's been. It's, definitely interesting, very much in the same space as ourselves innovators, and of course I, I failed to mention at the beginning you've, you also have a podcast called the Veterinary Innovation podcast and. I, I, I think there are, we, we are a conservative profession, the veterinary profession, and there is a fear of tech.

You know, in all professions probably, so it, it's it's certainly great to have somebody like yourself who can help us make some sense of it. And of course, you know, we've gone through this huge transformation over the last year with coronavirus, and obviously coronavirus has been a terrible thing, as you know, in the UK we're still in, in quite a mess with it. But maybe in a, in a few years we'll, within the sacrifice and all the terrible tragedy within it, we, we'll see perhaps some of the blessings and and some of the ways that it's helped us to transform and become more efficient.

Maybe also more aware of the environment and you know how driving around can affect us and things as well. So that must be an interesting journey for you as well, seeing how digital and tech has has changed so much in the last 12 months. Oh my gosh, has it ever, you know, I think.

If we, if we go back to, back to the good old days, you know, back to kind of early March last year, I was in a hotel in Florida at, I think one of the last in-person veterinary trade shows that happened in the world. And my view of the world back then was very different than it is today, you know, my view of the world then. If we particularly zoom in to the work world, you know, being a, a 40 year old, I thought that we all needed to go to a central place to work, to collaborate with each other, to share ideas, to have conversations in the hallway.

And I was, I was the, the old guy in my company, 2nd oldest, and I can't forget my, my business partner and co-founder who will always be older than me by about a year. So I'm the 2nd oldest in the company and we're, we're 15 now, but I was, I had this kind of very closed eyed view of the world, which is, you know, if we're gonna do work, we gotta go to a place, we gotta do the work, we gotta be. You know, I, I hate to say it, Anthony, but chained to the desk, you know, and that's how I thought work was done.

And I think for me, you know, other than, you know, the obvious, you know, kind of digital transformation that's happened in the last, you know, 12 months or, you know, 89 months now, the big thing that's changed, I think for a lot of us is the way that we view work, you know, and our openness and I guess new flexibility when it comes to how work should be done and what work actually is. And and I gotta tell you, for me, my commute has changed from 30 minutes to about 3 seconds. I gotta come up the stairs and around the corner, come to my office, and I personally like it more.

I don't think I ever would have got to the point where I was able to say that. If it hadn't been for COVID-19, so I think we're already starting to see some You know, early kind of gems that are gonna come out of this thing, you know, the, the freedom and flexibility to kind of work more on individual terms, focusing more around outcomes and less about, you know, just, just bureaucratic BS that's been around for probably way too long. Curious to hear what you think about that.

Well, you know, we've been holding Zoom meetings for the last 5 years and quite often because of my environmental credentials, I'd say, well, rather than come down to you for the first meeting, let's just chat over the phone because, or over Zoom. Quite often, you know, from that meeting face to face, you could work out if there was a fit and then whether a physical meeting was necessary. So you were already saving time and, and of course it's been great to see how Zoom has has taken off.

I believe it it's it's increased its customer. Numbers 30-fold over the last 12 months, which is quite remarkable, isn't it? So, I, you know, I, I think just obviously examples like that just show how important it is to, to use technology in a way that serves us and and you know, helps the planet as well.

Yeah. That's really fascinating that you know, we, we both can see how. Digital transformation has happened so quickly.

I, I kind of look at last year as the beginning of almost like ground zero of the digital decades and we've probably made as much progress in this last year as would have in normal times taken 10 years, wouldn't it? Yeah, I mean, back in the first couple of weeks of the pandemic, I had heard Satya, the CEO of Microsoft, say that, you know, we've experienced 2 years of digital transformation in the 1st 2 weeks of the pandemic, and I think that that holds true and has continued, you know, I, I think people have had no choice but to change. And I think the most interesting thing, it's not necessarily around technology, it's around patterns of human behaviour.

I think we're actually reaching a place where this change has now become. More permanent than a lot of us might like to have imagined it would have become. I think that, I think that a lot of the change that we've experienced is here to stay.

Which is really interesting. I mean, and it affects so many areas of the veterinary profession, you know, like, I know that most of us are excited to go back to veterinary trade shows, but I don't know if they'll ever be what they once were. You know, and if they'll always have this digital component.

So it's, it's just gonna be very interesting to see how the next, you know, no one wants to put a time on it either, which is, which is really interesting, you know, see how the next year or the next years play out because I think that we, we have experienced this big change. Anthony, one thing that blew my mind away, I was working with a veterinary, consolidator group is a multi-hospital practise in Maine. And they're they're deploying talk to our voice dictation software.

And so the interesting thing about that is as they're getting ready to deploy it, we're going to have this all doctors meeting and so they invite me to a Zoom call and I get on the Zoom call and there's 19 veterinarians on the call, all with their video on. And I mean it just was blowing my mind because our, our job is to help people speed up their interactions with technology. That's what we do with talking to.

And I'm on with these veterinarians and they've got an 8:30 call that starts at 8:30 on the dot. Everybody's there, everybody's engaged. And I was like, I felt like I was back to working with Google or some other, you know, tech company, seeing this, you know, widely adopted technology being used with people that I just didn't really have a frame of network to see them using the technology and here all of a sudden I'm on this call, which is one of the biggest video calls I've been on probably in the last year.

So just really, really interesting. I think I know you made a really good point. Once you develop a habit over a year, it becomes habitual, so actually it's unlikely that we will lose all of this once countries open up again.

Yeah. But tell me a little bit more about Talker Two. What actually does it do?

Yeah, sure, I, I absolutely love to. So our mission is literally speeding up the way that humans interact with technology. So when we do that through voice and through specifically through dictation.

So our software is a a one button application that instals on Windows or Apple computers, so not phones, yet, and not digital speakers or smart speakers yet, but in the future we'll be there as well. And what we allow the physician or anybody in veterinary medicine to do is to input text with their voice instead of using the keyboard. And so we rely on the largest neural network or the biggest computer system in the world.

That's what processes the speech and drives the text out for the users. So it's really quick and it's really smart, and it's really easy to use. So literally one button, start dictation.

Put the cursor where you want the text to go, and it's gonna type out everything that you said very accurately and the and the most interesting thing that we've been able to crack or the thing that's the most unique about our dictation solution is wars that you want to or any wars that you want to type or use our software, it works. So that means that it integrates with every single veterinary practise management software on the in the world. It means that you can use it in any email application, any word processor, literally words that you can type, you can use this software and it gets you to the point where you can have the same experience regardless of the platform.

So if you're on Windows, great. If you're on Mac, great. If you want to switch back and forth between those two operating systems, you can do that, and it will work just as well on one computer as it does on all your other computers because we're saving your individual programming of our software in the cloud so that when you use it, it works everywhere is the same way.

That's what we do. That's that's amazing. And of course it can save so much time, obviously not all of us are such tyrs.

Interestingly, would it understand a thick Scouse accent from Liverpool? Yeah, absolutely. So, so we've, we're right now only working in the English language, but we've got so much data from different.

You know, millions of speakers, not just from our software, but the, the platform that we built on top of had so much audio data from all around the world that we've actually had somebody. Begin to write a book that has MS and is barely, you're barely able to understand what he's saying, but our software because of the AI and machine learning behind it, is able to kind of pull out the annunciations and put text to electronic medium better than we would be able to receive or understand that voice. So accents are no problem.

This is amazing, and of course as you said, I can see applications immediately when you're writing your notes after seeing a case, but also when I practised as a vet, I, I was a, I did dermatology and often I had to write referral letters back to the vets who'd referred cases, so I would imagine referral specialists are a big part of your market. Absolutely. It's everybody in the veterinary space can benefit from our software.

Definitely referral practises, definitely surgeons, definitely your, your Average vet that just has to write more than they ever wanted to when they went into veterinary school and you know, our, our kind of claim to fame or what we tell people that, you know, really dive into our software and give it a try is that we can literally cut your record time in half. You know, I, I got an example of a veterinarian, that's one of our power users, and she wrote 65,000 words with our software in the last 30 days. Which is amazing.

And even, you know, as you say, writing a book, it takes all that stress and strain off your off your wrists and off your fingers as well from tapping on the computer, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right. You know, it's it's interesting, we've learned so much like in our, you know, brief history as a company.

You know, one of the things that I learned that really surprised me and is, is definitely showing my, sophisticated salesmanship is that dictation is not for everybody. And it's, it's so interesting, you know, as we've gone along and acquired customers and got feedback from people, one of the things that we found out is that some people actually think well they're typing, and it helps them think and it helps them put their words. Together and you know, we, we really can't do much to help those people.

So it's, you know, it's not that we're just like this kind of holy grail of a software solution that's gonna fix everybody's problems, but I can tell you for the people that can annunciate their words well and that that like speaking, that lean into speaking, our software literally has the power to change their work life forever. That's really fascinating, Sean. Just before we go, perhaps you could leave us with how we can, how people who are listening to the podcast can get into contact with you if they'd be interested in, in using the service.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean Takatu.com is our website.

We're on all the social media platforms, and if you wanted to reach out to me directly, probably LinkedIn is is the best medium to do that, or Sean at talkatu.com. Sean, that's fantastic.

Thank you so much for your time, take care and hope it's not too cold in in Nova Scotia and and not too much snow. Now it's bloody cold and there's a lot of snow, so. Nothing we could do to fix that, but thanks so much for having me on and thanks for all the, the work that you guys do to help the community.

Thanks, Sean. Take care. Bye bye.