BytePlus, the enterprise arm of ByteDance that supports businesses in accelerating their digital transformation capabilities, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with EduSpaze, a Singapore-based education technology (EdTech) accelerator, to tranform Singapore’s EdTech sector with machine learning.

The MoU will see startups within EduSpaze’s ecosystem leverage BytePlus’ technology to foster and drive innovation in the education sector in Singapore and across Southeast Asia (SEA), both parties said in a statement.

According to the statement, the cooperation commitment between BytePlus and EduSpaze aims to contribute to the development of a larger ecosystem and community of schools, education institutions, EdTech startups, publishers, educators, and other stakeholders across SEA.

This comes at a time where Asia is one of the fastest-growing regions for EdTech products, with an estimated annual growth rate of 17.5 percent through 2027.

“EdTech, has gained a lot of traction over the past few years owing to the shift to online learning due to the pandemic. Investing in robust classroom technology has and will continue to be high on the agenda to bring about sustainable transformation of the education sector,” said Abhinav Gupta, Head of Partnerships, BytePlus.

“We are thrilled about our venture with EduSpaze. This collaboration lets Byteplus work first-hand with startups to understand, assess, and address their challenges,

“With our solutions, the startups can help make change more adaptable for the sector such as creating rich and engaging learning experiences for both students and educators,” he added.

To aid EdTech startups with the challenges of the modern classroom, BytePlus has been expanding its machine learning (ML) capabilities to offer tools that can help educators and EdTech platforms innovate further, while increasing engagement for learners.

For instance, BytePlus’ sentiment analysis technology can help educators and learning platforms monitor a student’s focus levels. This can help educators comprehend student experiences and accordingly improve their teaching methodology.

To overcome linguistic barriers to learning, BytePlus also has in place Neural Machine Translation for Text Translation which enables educators to record a lesson in their local language and have it translated for students learning in other languages.

Moreover, Text-to-Speech technology allows teachers to create video content using existing study materials and include audio-visual cues to make the video lessons more engaging.

“We are very excited to partner with BytePlus. As a leading technology leader, BytePlus offers its technical expertise, that is essential to help our community build innovative and effective solutions,

“This partnership will help enhance the EdTech solutions we are rolling out which are beneficial to the entire education ecosystem across the region. We look forward to other collaborative opportunities with BytePlus in the near future,” said Alex Ng, Managing Director, EduSpaze.

The MoU has already seen one roundtable session held earlier in September 2022, where EduSpaze’s fifth cohort of startups were able to jointly explore how BytePlus’ digital capabilities can be used to better support EdTech startups at various stages of growth and development.

The in-depth discussions also shed a spotlight on the existing challenges faced by startups, and how BytePlus’ technical experts can help them overcome these challenges.

Among the startups involved in the discussion, HeyHi is looking to implement BytePlus’ various tools and features to create a more immersive learning experience for their students.

“We are excited about what BytePlus has to offer. With the availability of various ready-to-use Machine Learning tools, we can easily build, prototype and incorporate the new features into our personalised learning system to enhance our users’ experience,

“During the roundtable, we have seen the benefits of BytePlus’ video analytics solution and witnessed how this can be served as additional data points for educators to understand learners’ learning progress,” said Glenn Low, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of HeyHi.

BytePlus helps companies grow by providing them with access to cutting-edge technology and tools developed by ByteDance.

Its platform enables businesses to take advantage of its video distribution, machine learning, and data solutions to drive digital transformation and achieve sustained growth.

EduSpaze is Singapore’s first edtech accelerator supported by Enterprise Singapore, the enterprise development agency.

The firm aims to nurture a vibrant edtech startup ecosystem that serves the education sector in Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Eduspaze helps early stage edtech startups go to market, accelerate their growth, and co-innovate with other stakeholders in the space to address sector-specific challenges with innovative solutions that improve learning outcomes and the impact of education. EduSpaze is a part of Spaze Ventures.

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