58 START-UP ALLEY Valossa
VALOSSA Country: Finland Started: 2015 Last year AI was the hot topic of B2B technology shows. Robots were wheeled out for press conferences and content producers started to scratch their heads and wondered whether they’d be out of a job in five year’s time. Meanwhile, Finnish company Valossa was quietly showcasing its automated video recognition and insight tools and attracting significant interest. Valossa is a great example of a real- life use case for AI, which helps, rather than replaces, content producers as the growing amount of video streaming becomes impossible to curate using only human labour. Based on a proprietary technology using computer vision, natural language processing, information retrieval and
pattern recognition methodologies, Valossa AI analyses videos, automatically generating descriptive tags, categories and overviews. The tech – which grew out of one of Europe’s leading computer science and AI labs at the University of Oulu – can be used to help locate and search archives for anything inside a video: dialogue, emotions, colours, objects and more. For non-live streaming, Valossa CEO Mika Rautiainen says that common use cases include “scene-level content search and discovery, highlighting potentially inappropriate content and enabling targeted advertising by providing insight on the content types and topics”. For live, he adds, “it’s about fast recognition of important events and
moments, as well as appearances of brands, key people and products”. The system’s ease-of-use and level of analysis is impressive: it not only recognises faces but even identifies the ages of people – though it somewhat unfairly labelled the 57-year old musician Stephen Duy as a ‘senior citizen’ in the demo which I witnessed. Such issues, however, are rapidly being ironed out according to Sami Niska, Valossa’s chief sales oicer. “The AI is constantly improving based on our customer data and feedback, and Insight Tools are being enhanced with features that make the training of customer-specific recognition a simple process,” she says. According to Rautiainen, in the start-up’s early phase, Finnish pubcaster
MICA RAUTIAINEN AI will enhance the customer experience while increasing revenue and lowering OPEX for live streaming customers
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