TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A team of Taiwanese AI developers won the top prize in the OpenAI Stack Hack competition on March 23, beating over 500 teams from around the globe with their AI powered email assistant that helps East Asian non-native English speakers write better business emails.

Team member Aidan said the idea for the assistant came from his time working in startups, and that he and other professionals like him would constantly check grammar and sentence structure when writing business emails to native English speakers. “Finding the right balance between professionalism and appropriate tone can be difficult,” the team said, “and non-native English speakers may struggle to communicate their ideas in a way that is both clear and culturally sensitive.”

The Mars Mail team used ChatGPT to create the product, and said that after a period of internal testing they can see great potential for its commercialization, per TechNews. Users of the product can input their desired message in Mandarin and the program will output a response that matches their native English speaking recipients' tone and style.

In addition to taking away the competition’s US$15,000 (NT$455,257) top prize, organizer LabLab said the team will participate in the invitation only startup accelerator program for early-stage AI projects. The program will give the team access to AI and engineering experts, tech, and industry contacts.