Outstanding initiatives in IT, science and technology were honoured with the Vietnamese Talent Awards 2018 at an award ceremony held in Hanoi on November 20.

With the theme of “The Power of Digital Technology,” this year’s awards in IT attracted a total of 318 products.

The judges decided not to grant the first-prize as no products were considered worthy enough, but two second-place, five third-place and seven consolation prizes to the most outstanding IT products at this year’s event.

Accordingly, the second-place IT prize went to Vbee – Vietnamese Text to Speech by Vbee JSC, which is the first service in Vietnam using artificial intelligence to turn Vietnamese text into human-sounding speech. Stringee – Communication APIs for voice, video and SMS by Stringee JSC, which also won the second prize, which helps developers and businesses quickly add SMS, video, or voice calling to apps and websites without having to build or maintain the back-end infrastructure.

In addition, the organisers also presented the Vietnamese Talent Awards 2018 in medicine to honour excellent researches on medicine which have been applied in practice to achieve high efficiency in disease examination and treatment and have significant socio-economic implications. Accordingly, the Epidemiology - new advances in the diagnosis, treatment and improvement of breast cancer treatment, by Prof., Dr. Tran Van Thuan, Director of K Hospital in Hanoi, and his colleagues, won the awards.

In science and technology field, the Vietnamese Talents Awards 2018 was granted to the work related to the application of mechanised technology in coal mining to improve productivity at Ha Lam Coal JSC by engineer Le Minh Chuan and his colleagues.

In Environment field, the top prize award was presented to the invention of a toxic waste incinerator and a book featuring solutions for designing green works in Vietnam by Prof., Dr Pham Ngoc Dang from Vietnam Association for Conservation of Nature and Environment.

The organisers also presented six prizes to promote self-learning individuals who have overcome difficulties to contribute to their community at the event.

The value of prizes in this year’s awards was doubled with VND200 million for first prize winners, VND100 million for second prizes and VND50 million for third prizes.

Since its first held in 2005 to honour inventions in IT, the Vietnamese Talent Awards, co-hosted by the VNPT group and Dan Tri Newspaper, have been expanded to multiple other fields in the past 13 years, including health, sciences and technologies, environment, and talents promotion.