Fresh, local, and ethically sourced data coming to an algorithm near you.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Lili Jamali.

It can be easy to overlook the people behind all the technology we use, but a start-up

called Karya, based in India, is putting them front and center, both in its method and

its marketing.

Karya's stated goal is to alleviate poverty for low-income Indians, paying them approximately

$5 an hour, a wage that's higher than market rate, all to create data.

Karya starts by sending prompts through a smartphone app to workers who record themselves

speaking their native languages.

Those recordings are the foundation of massive data sets that Karya then sells to tech companies,

universities, and others who use them to train AI models.

I spoke with Vivek Seishadri, the company's co-founder and chief technology officer, about

how Karya fits into the lucrative data collection business.

Karya is a worker-first company, and all our co-founders strongly believe that AI, while

it is empowering all the world with the new technologies and its capabilities, also has

the potential to empower people on the ground by giving them not just supplemental income,

but also access to the technology which they may never get to use today.

We pay the highest wages in the data market, $5 an hour, for just recording sentences

on their phone and transmitting the speech data to us.

Right.

It doesn't employ these workers long-term, it's supplemental, right, like gig work.

This is gig work and we want to keep it that way because the mission for Karya is to create

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