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The term “attack surface” is often used in cybersecurity to refer to all the angles a bad actor might exploit to gain access. Connecting any data to the cloud widens your surface exponentially, so if your organisation holds commercially sensitive meetings that data should be locked down.
That means avoiding productivity tools with built-in transcription software – or at least it has until now.
For those businesses that absolutely need the highest level of confidentiality, Swiss startup CSky believes it has the solution in ClearMind. This is a “privacy-by-design collaboration device”, which uses AI during meetings to take notes and generate transcripts, but with a bonus: it does it all within the device. The data never leaves the room.
Because it doesn’t rely on the cloud or the internet to work its magic, ClearMind has a much lower attack surface. Content can still be accessed securely, such as through API integrations that connect it to a document management system. But the data is encrypted both at rest on the device and in transit.
We sat down with Hugo Flayac, Co-Founder and CEO of CSky, at CES to learn more about ClearMind. Interview below, edited for clarity.
My name is Hugo Flayac, I’m a Co-Founder and CEO of CSky. We are a spin-off of EPFL, a quite famous University in Switzerland, and we focus on enabling the highest level of confidential meetings. So we are particularly relevant to board meetings or executive meetings where there is a strong need for automation nowadays, but not at the expense of privacy and security.
What we bring to the table is state-of-the-art AI in a hardware and software solution. Our device is split into two parts: a smart microphone, which you can think of as the ears of the solution, and a second part that you can think of as the brain. In the brain, we have a whole pipeline of AI that handles speech processing, speaker separation, speaker identification as well as minute generation customised to the company’s preference. It’s an all-in-one solution for confidential meetings.
We have the highest standard of enterprise-grade level of security for the hardware and the software. It’s been pen-tested by large organisations several times. So if you would steal this device and run away with it, you couldn’t do anything, not extract any data, not spy on the software or anything else whatsoever. It’s secure to the highest standard. Of course, you can always find a fault, but to date, nobody has.
We are also in the process of certifying the whole machine.
We’ve been in business since May 2023 but the product itself has been in development since 2021. Because it’s a spin-off from the EPFL, the first round of funding came from the University. I have a background in Physics from the EPFL and used a lot of that knowledge on the product.
We now have clients in France and in Switzerland. The highest interest in this solution is from financial institutions. They currently have no solution other than a having secretary to do this job. They all want to move to AI, of course, both for competitive reasons and to enhance internal processes.
The integration can be customised for each organisation. The machine has an API that is embedded on the device and that API can be called from the outside. By default we recommend integrating it into the document management system through a local network, keeping the highest level of privacy and reducing the surface of attack.
The catalogue price is around $1,000 per month, with unlimited users and unlimited usage.
One very obvious use case is medical consultation – we’ve been exploring that market on the side. The biggest opportunity in the medical domain is psychiatrists. Their conversations are highly confidential, very verbose, lengthy and, of course, with a patient. This is where our device makes the most sense. For a regular GP consultation, it doesn’t really make sense – there are plenty of solutions that can actually process that conversation in the cloud.
When you deal with hardware, finding the right partner, the right suppliers and setting up for future distribution of a device is always a challenge. But we have plenty of ideas to make it work. We are also discussing potential channel partnerships or reseller models. This year is the year everything comes together.
