A Day in the Life: Nick Knight

This week I’m introducing you to Nick Knight, co-founder and Product & Innovations Director at babblevoice. Nick tells me there was a degree of serendipity behind the decision to start his own business. A combination of global events, personal circumstances, and a meeting of minds ignited a spark that had been waiting in the wings all his adult life.

Nick, what made you take the plunge to set up your own business?

Sadly, school was not a place where I thrived. As soon as I could, I entered the world of work, initially taking up an electronics apprenticeship in Manchester. Gradually, the industry of engineering opened up to me as a fascination, and to this day I remain passionate about it. From fixing testing equipment, to working on electronic car components, to the theory and practice of my engineering degree - I still can’t get enough of it!

Looking back, I think I always wanted to set up my own company as my Grandad had before me. But it wasn’t until I was looking after my daughter full-time, following my wife Theresa going back to work as a GP, that I realised that now could be that moment.

What do you most enjoy about working at babblevoice?

Like a lot of my colleagues here, I feel passionately about working with the NHS. Our role in supporting GPs, practice managers and their teams to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively is hugely rewarding.

As for the work itself, I love that I’m still hands on with electronics! Of course, leading my own successful company is a dream come true. Antoine and I felt slightly bonkers in the beginning because we were forging a different path and not following the crowd. But problem solving for surgeries in innovative ways is still something that excites me today.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My work varies hugely from day to day. Sometimes I’ll have my head down solving a knotty programming challenge and other days will involve a lot of talking! From discussing our business with a potential new health tech partner, to seeking feedback from a customer, to coaching one of our new developers.

We have strong communication across our whole business, and I regularly start the day with a departmental team call for a technical catch up. It’s a great opportunity for everyone to ask questions, gain feedback and seek advice.

At the moment, I’m leading our work on becoming more sustainable. So most days include some time focusing on exploring options to reduce our carbon footprint and working towards B Corp certification.

What excites you most about your work?

I believe there are some really exciting opportunities for the health tech sector from AI. We’re currently working on developing a ‘babblevoice-bot’ for assisting with triage and signposting. Using AI, the bot talks patients through plain-English questions to extract information relevant to the surgery’s triage workflows. Our work with specialist digital triage providers such as Engage Health Systems enables these patient responses to seamlessly integrate with triage systems like Engage Consult. Realising the potential of this new technology on behalf of our surgery customers will be a fascinating journey.

What are you most looking forward to in the coming year?

Last year saw the launch of babblevoice 2.0 to our surgeries to deliver increased stability, responsiveness and energy efficiency. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the initial results of this roll-out. We’ll be analysing the impact of babblevoice 2.0 and working hard behind the scenes on tweaking systems to improve energy efficiencies as much as we can to realise the associated cost savings for surgeries.

What would you like someone who’s interested in working for babblevoice to know?

In addition to the interesting work on offer, I would highlight some of the other elements. There are learning development opportunities across our business, to enable people to develop their own careers, as well as benefiting babblevoice. We embrace flexible working with a range of part time and full time roles and have people based all over the country from Scotland to the home counties. We work hard to keep a team spirit, despite our distant geographies by bringing everyone together such as just last week when we all met in Norfolk for a full company get together. Sometimes, nothing beats having dinner and a chat in person.

Development engineers are central to babblevoice. You could be building innovative products to enable excellent connectivity and intelligent patient access for a modern primary healthcare. If you’re interested in joining our development and engineering team, please contact us at info@babblevoice.com.