Appen Announces Technology Integration With Recently Acquired Figure Eight

Ciarán Daly

May 3, 2019

3 Min Read

SYDNEY - Companies and governments worldwide can now accelerate their AI and machine learning programs with large volumes of high-quality training data, thanks to the integration of the industry’s leading data annotation tool with a global leader in solutions and services for data collection and annotation.

Appen Limited, a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), recently announced it has completed the acquisition of Figure Eight, as well as the technology integration of Figure Eight’s industry-leading SaaS platform with Appen’s global crowd of over 1 million skilled contractors. Figure Eight customers now have access to Appen’s extensive crowd resources directly through the Figure Eight platform.

Appen
offers a highly efficient workforce management platform, a scalable, skillful,
multilingual crowd, as well as multiple delivery models: open contributors,
curated at-home crowds, secure/NDA crowds and on-site workers. The combination
of Appen’s skilled and diverse global workforce with Figure Eight’s ML-assisted
data annotation platform creates a robust training data offering designed to
enhance AI initiatives for a wide variety of use cases. This offering is
uniquely positioned to deliver on the increasing volume, quality and speed
requirements for training data to support business innovations and efficiencies
which use ML and AI.

“With
a critical component of our integration complete, we’re excited for the
opportunity to deliver immediate value to Figure Eight customers, who can now
accelerate their AI and machine learning initiatives with the massive scale of
Appen’s crowd,” said Mark Brayan, Appen’s Chief Executive Officer. “We’re also
pleased to offer even more flexible work-from-home opportunities to our crowd
as a result of integrating with the Figure Eight platform.”

The Combination of Human and
Machine Intelligence

With the newly integrated platform and global
crowd services, customers can rapidly develop training datasets. Existing
Figure Eight platform users will immediately gain access to over 1 million
on-demand global crowd workers covering 130 countries across 180 languages and
dialects. This expansion in sourced annotators, combined with the automated
quality controls and machine learning–assisted annotation tools of Figure
Eight, will allow both Figure Eight and Appen customers to scale their AI
initiatives.

The importance of high-quality training data

The accuracy of a machine learning model depends on the quality of the ground truth data used to train it. Most engineers are familiar with the adage, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Correctly labeling the training datasets is key to creating an AI solution that works. Appen + Figure Eight provide training data collection and annotation for leaders in technology, automotive, financial services, manufacturing, and governments worldwide.

Common use cases include:

  • Text & natural language processing

  • Automatic speech recognition and speech-to-text

  • Machine translation

  • Image & video annotation for computer vision

  • Search relevance

  • Content moderation

  • Data enrichment & categorization

  • In-car infotainment & navigation

  • Virtual assistant & chatbot training

  • Risk management & fraud detection models

  • Social media analytics

Appen and Figure Eight will be showcasing their data annotation
technology and services at the AI Summit London, June 12 to 13. Learn more at appen.com

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