Helping vets save time with AI tool Broby

Two Singapore Polytechnic students develop software that uses speech-to-text technology to transcribe and summarise veterinary consultations

- Joanne Soh

What started as a personal struggle with their own dogs has become an entrepreneurial success story for two 18-year-olds at Singapore Polytechnic (SP).

Second-year business students Hyuga Karamochi and Caleb Yap Keane Yang have made impressive headway with their startup, Broby, an artificial intelligence (AI) transcribing tool that automates medical documentation for veterinarians.

The idea of starting a business related to pets germinated when Hyuga's four-year-old toy poodle Abby had to wear the Elizabethan collar after minor surgery in 2024.

Seeing how the dog struggled with the cone, Hyuga and Caleb came up with the idea of a bitter-tasting bandage to prevent pets from licking wounds.

The two classmates set up Broby, a portmanteau of their pets' names - Caleb's cavapoo Brownie and Hyuga's Abby.

But feedback for their initial business idea from veterinarians was not promising.

They were told that such bandages are not new and most dogs would find a way to chew off even the bitterest patch.

"That idea didn't work and, at first, it felt like a setback," Caleb said. The Singaporean added that the more time they spent shadowing vets, the more they noticed that vets spend huge amounts of time writing consultation notes.

PIVOTING TO AI

In April, the students decided to pivot their passion project to a smarter solution: to develop an AI tool that auto-generates notes and valuable data for research and reports.

As neither of them had any technical knowledge, they taught themselves coding basics and leaned on friends from SP's School of Computing, as well as external mentors.