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The biggest startup we’ve ever covered at PreSeed Now is undoubtedly ElevenLabs, which we profiled back before their seed round was announced.

Now, three-and-a-half years on, let’s meet a startup building upon the ElevenLabs platform.

Can AskEd build a serious business in the higher education sector on top of AI voice tech? Let’s find out….

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AskEd wants to help universities recruit more students with slick conversational AI

It’s no secret that the university sector in the UK is struggling right now, and international students are the lifeblood of many of our most esteemed academic institutions.

AskEd is a new startup looking to step into this space and provide an AI-powered solution to some of the pain points affecting universities’ abilities to maximise student recruitment.

The team has set out to address the problem that many prospective international students will want answers to questions at times of day when university student recruitment teams aren’t working. And even when students do get through to someone, the language barrier can be an issue.

A recent survey in Australia found that 59% of international students disengaged from a university because communication felt "slow or difficult."

As AskEd co-founder and CEO Stefan Parker explains, many universities just have a contact form, and any live chat feature available doesn’t work outside office hours. A chatbot might be available in some cases, but it’s usually rudimentary.

The solution AskEd has come up with is a conversational AI assistant product that works across more than 70 languages. It can be deployed on the web, in apps, or on the phone and is trained each university’s own data using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

“The product handles inquiries in real time. It's asking questions, it's identifying intent; it can differentiate between a casual browser and a serious applicant. In a nutshell, it's voice AI for student recruitment conversion,” Parker says.

“The assistants that we're creating, they ask questions, they drive progression. Universities and education providers don't just want leads. That's very surface-level information. They want more depth, so what our product does is create better quality leads.”

AskEd’s product can work via text or voice input. The latter is built upon ElevenLabs’ acclaimed AI voice generation technology.

I tried the voice-based version of the product in English and found it to be surprisingly natural in helping me as I pretended to be an international student looking to study in the UK.

In addition to sharing information in conversation, Ihen used in a browser, the assistant is capable of opening a relevant web page to point the user directly to the information they need.

At the end of the conversation, the user receives a summary of all the information they wanted. Meanwhile, the educational establishment gets a lead score out of 100 for how much of a priority they are for followup contact or marketing.

The story so far

Parker has a background in sales, including several years spent working with media-focused higher education establishment MetFilm School.

Finding himself made redundant from a role with a different employer late last year, he found himself playing around with ElevenLabs’ technology. Inspired by the ElevenAgents offering, he built a quick demo to solve the pain points in student recruitment he had seen for himself.

He went to the Middlesex University campus in North London and asked students if they would find it useful as an alternative if a human wasn’t available to talk to.

Encouraged by the positive feedback he received, Parker pitched the idea to a former colleague, John Crick, who has a background in international student recruitment and experience working with an early-stage startup.

The pair co-founded AskEd in November last year, weeks after Parker built the initial prototype.

Parker explains that by January this year they had an improved prototype rolled out as a pilot with a higher education establishment. Since then, Parker says they have received grant support from ElevenLabs to support development of the product and established an advisory council of senior figures him academia.

“[The advisory council] can see the value. They can see the future of how this might be applied. That creates greater credibility, because what's really important is that we're building a product that people trust. There are a lot of AI worries out there, and what we have created is an incredibly sophisticated product that tackles those challenges head on,” Parker says.

Crick believes beyond directly serving students with the product as it is, the data they collect about how students use the product will be useful to make international student recruitment even better in the future:

“Eventually, we will absolutely be the masters of that sort of insight. What do [prospective students] ask? What are the nuances? What do they ask when they're speaking in their own language that they can't ask when they're speaking in English?

“There's a lot of scope there for really understanding the psychology of buyer behaviour in this particular sector.”

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