Amazon AI Awards 2017: Recognising the future of AI

There is a fascinating irony to the fact that all around us, ‘artificial’ intelligence is making everything ‘smarter’. As the boundaries between human and machine intelligence blur, our world is becoming one where machines can recognise human faces, drive cars, win game shows and beat grandmasters. From adjusting the lighting and temperature of our homes, to increasing in-store footfalls, improving customer service using chatbots and boosting rural economies, AI has transformed the way we are doing business.

For more than two decades, Amazon has been at the forefront of investments in the development of AI. Today, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms drive many of their internal systems and form the fulcrum of their products and services. Everything, from path optimisation in their fulfilment centres, Amazon.com’s recommendations engine, Echo powered by Alexa, their drone initiative Prime Air, and even Amazon Go runs on their ML capabilities. The e-commerce giant is now on a bigger mission to share their learnings and these capabilities as fully managed services, and put them into the hands of every developer and data scientist.

Recognising achievements in AI

As part of this drive, and to showcase the increasing role AI is playing in the world of emerging startups, Amazon hosted the two-day Amazon AI Conclave in Bengaluru on December 14 and 15. The event culminated in the Amazon AI Awards, held in partnership with Intel, to recognise the best and most innovative work in AI and deployment of business solutions across education, healthcare, retail and e-commerce, media and entertainment, financial services, consumer engagement, Indian language solutions, enterprise, analytics, and AI tools.

The awards were open to companies that offered B2C and B2B solutions using AI, while also leveraging one or more AI-based solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The shortlisted companies were announced on December 11 and had the opportunity to present before a jury on December 14. The winners received their awards at the Amazon AI Conclave on December 14.

Winners’ circle

Consumer Engagement: Haptik

Haptik has been building end-to-end chatbot platforms since 2013. The company’s offerings include a bot builder, bot analytics, and an agent dashboard for monitoring and management. It provides a complete range of solutions, including design, content, and development across sectors like FMCG, Travel, and Healthcare.

R&E: Unbxd

Unbxd is an e-commerce product discovery platform that applies advanced data sciences to connect shoppers to the products they are most likely to buy, while providing predictive actionable insights for merchandising.

Healthcare: Niramai

Niramai is developing a novel software to detect breast cancer at a much earlier stage than traditional methods or self-examination. The core technology is an AI-led diagnostic platform that uses patented thermal image processing and machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate breast cancer screening. 

Vernacular: liv.ai

Liv.ai leverages Deep Learning to develop products that can take over routine, repetitive, mundane and time-consuming tasks. liv.ai’s speech API enables developers to convert speech-to-text by using powerful neural network models. The API recognizes nine major Indian languages - English, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Tamil and Telugu.

Media and Entertainment: Tessact

Tessact’s artificial intelligence and data analytics platform serves customers primarily in the Media and Entertainment space. In addition to video analysis (facial recognition, scene detection, subtitle extraction, etc.), Tessact uses multi-lingual ASR to extract metadata from the audio to automatically tag videos.

Enterprise: Uncanny Vision

Uncanny Vision is a technology company focused on Computer Vision on Embedded systems. Its Software Toolkit enhances the performance of your computer vision algorithms. Its products include UncannyCV - A computer vision/image processing library; UncannyDL - an on-device Deep Learning library for mobile and embedded applications; and UncannySurveillance – an Award-winning AI-based surveillance solution targeted at challenging security & analytics applications.

Financial Services: CreditVidya

CreditVidya offers an alternate credit scoring platform using 10,000+ data points leveraging Big Data and advanced Machine Learning techniques. The platform also offers verification services and fraud check services.

Analytics: boxx.ai

Boxx.ai is a business intelligence (BI) solution for sales and marketing to generate leads, promote the right products and services and retain customers via an AI-enabled assistant, Aida. The AI assistant monitors data constantly for opportunities and recommends initiatives to be invested in based on historical data, machine learning, and real-time feedback.

Education: Embibe

Embibe​ ​is​ ​an​ ​AI​-powered​ edtech​ ​platform​ that helps improve ​learning​ ​outcomes​ ​for​ ​students​ ​at​ ​scale. It leverages​ ​content intelligence, user​ intelligence and​ mentor​ intelligence to deliver results.

The winners walked away with Amazon devices, AWS credit, third-party startup offers, technical advisory from AWS experts, introductions to companies that comprised the target audience and mentoring sessions from industry experts.