The story of our name: Tekst.ai

People often ask where our name Tekst.ai comes from. Here is the story back from the beginning:

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The idea started back in February 2021. Tiebe and Wouter, the 2 founders already knew each other their whole life and joined forces.

Annoyed with our mailboxes on the one hand and with a big NLP-related frustration on the other hand. The 2 of them started pivoting and validating towards a competitive business edge in the customer support world which eventually lead to Tekst.ai in its current form. Maximizing support with fewer resources by connecting the support tickets to the right knowledge article or agent creating instant service, less backlog, and accurate reports to proactively improve self-service and creating more satisfied customers.

One thing that was set from the beginning however was the name, even bought before the founders had their first chat about it.

Tiebe, the technical co-founder has been frustrated about 2 trends in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) space:

1. All the cool NLP stuff that gets build only works in English. How is it possible that all the focus is on English only while 95% of planet earth speaks another language? He wanted to change something about this and build cool multilingual AI (without translation but models that understand Dutch, French, Spanish, etc)
2. A lot of research stays stuck in research. The past years have been great for the AI field, however, most of the AI used in products is still based on some keywords and rule-based techniques. Slow, inaccurate, and hard to set up - not exactly what you would expect when talking about the newest AI tools.

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This multilingualism and the productization of ai defined the origin of our name. The name Tekst.ai comes from Tekst - which is text in Dutch. As an NLP-based tech company, everything we create is based on text as input. It’s Dutch because we want to underline the fact that we do more than English only. (The founders are also from Belgium (the Dutch-speaking part)). The .ai instead of a regular .com is chosen because we are an AI-first product company - AI is part of the absolute core of what we do. 

The full name Tekst.ai has a cool (and interesting) side effect as well. Our website gets boosted whenever someone talks about us. A lot of backlinks have been generated this way, which helps our visibility and spreads the word that smarter customer support is possible.

Kind regards from the Tekst.ai team. We hope you like the way our name sounds 🙂

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