My Internship Experience at Vernacular.ai

An internship is an opportunity for every undergraduate student. It allows them to put theory into practice; it helps them to understand the market and hone up their skills. Like most interns, I wanted to explore a variety of roles to understand my strengths and core deliverables.

Since I had prior experience as an intern, now I wanted to know how it is to work with a start-up. Still, before sending in my application, I had to have a word with my seniors to understand which AI-based start-up was best to work with, after hour-long discussions, they pointed out Vernacular.ai. All I knew was that they started up in our institution and that they had many alumni from IIT Roorkee working there.

After a lot of deliberation, I finally sent in my application for a six-week internship at Vernacular.ai. Soon after, I had been through four rounds of interviews, and eventually, they had offered me the post of Machine Learning Intern.

I joined the team on 3rd December in Bangalore, and during my first week there, I had mostly spent my time getting to know everyone and learning more about speech tech. As the days moved on, the work got more interesting. The team had several great ideas to work on, and I was overwhelmed by the choices I had; So we discussed each problem statement and decided to begin with gender detection using speech. It was intriguing yet not as fascinating as speech to intent, but this step got me comfortable with the domain, before diving deeper.

Once I started working on the problem, things got a whole lot interesting, The team got me involved in their day to day planning, The session would usually take place in the morning, and it allowed us to state our daily progress and blockers. We called this “Stand-up.” it helped a lot in planning out the whole day for the team and gave me an understating of what my deliverables are.

To ensure that everybody was synchronized and delivering on time, the team would have a retrospective meeting at the end of the week; it would help everyone understand what is done, what went wrong, and how we can improve. This process helped as it gave me a lot of feedback on the work I did and showed me how I could improve.

Apart from the daily routine of work and meetings, we would have other technical activities such as paper-reading and several-people-are-talking. These activities were informative as they review research papers and have open discussions. Here is an example of several-people-are-talking:

Getting work done fast and effective is key while working at a start-up, but Vernacular.ai is not just about work. It has its calendar filled with fun events, ranging from outings and office parties, to connect activities. My best experience was at the company outing, which took place at the Mango-mist resort. We had an ecstatic time there, which brought a lot of laughs and lighter moments to the team.

Working here for the last 45 days has been amazing; it has helped me have a better understanding of my skills and has also shown me where I need to improve. I would suggest not to miss out on an opportunity to work with them, as they have a lot to offer. Here is me signing off and hoping to reconnect with Vernacular.ai soon.

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