Blog

Harnessing the Power of AI Training Data for Success in the Retail and Ecommerce Industry

In today’s digital age, customers have high expectations when it comes to their shopping experiences. Whether shopping online or in a brick-and-mortar store, they want to be able to find the products they’re looking for quickly and easily. Catalogs, both physical and digital, are essential when it comes to shopping from any retail business. With the rise in e-commerce from ...

Blog

Why I Joined Appen as CEO

Dear Friends:  Today, I start as the new CEO and President of Appen. I’m excited to join this amazing company and enable our team members and customers to build a trusted and innovative AI applications that deliver new and exciting experiences.  Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are giving rise to AI powered solutions that can see, hear, learn, and reason, ...

Blog

Appen’s 2023 AI Data Predictions

We live in a society that’s ever changing, always wanting more, always wanting to see what the next big thing will be. To kick off 2023, we tapped some of our executives and thought leaders to share their predictions of what the year has in store for the future of AI and Data. Sujatha Sagiraju, Erik Vogt, and Jen Cole ...

Blog

Data: The Greatest Challenge and Biggest Reward

Ready to Begin Your AI Journey? 3 Steps Financial Advisors Can Take Now  Wealth management is benefitting from recent advances in AI. Alerts can now be generated for when financial status’ change. In this Barron’s article, Jen Cole shares how deep learning is ideal for complex data analysis. Jen state’s that “Robo-advisors are good examples of deep learning at work. ...

Blog

Ethical Data – Why Your AI Models Needs It

An Intro to Ethics The terms, “ethical data” and “responsible data” can be ambiguous in meaning. In the world of tech and AI data, ethics refers to responsible gathering and use of data to train models as well as ensuring that those models interact with humans without bias.  It’s not only important to gather and use the data responsibly for ...

Blog

Is it Magic, or is it Data?

All around the world, kids and adults alike are writing letters on the topic of what gifts they want for the holiday season. Some of these letters are given to friends or family, others are mailed to the person they know as Santa Claus. The exact number of languages that Santa can speak is unknown, but speculation says it could ...

Blog

Retail Restocking with Robots

“Let me check the back,” are words often heard over the past few years, as the item a person has come to purchase appears out of stock. With the rise of labor shortages over the past few years, shelves aren’t always fully stocked like many are used to. One way to alleviate the burden of constantly restocking and allow employees ...

Blog

Meet the Exec: Brian Haskett

From Draftsman to Management People say it’s good to start your career young and that’s exactly what Brian did. At the age of 12, he taught himself how to program computers at a time when the personal computer market was booming. By the age of 16, Brian was working as a draftsman at a local land surveying company—a job that ...

Blog

Unwrapping the Intelligence Behind Smart Gifts

Unless you’re in the tech industry, you’re likely not thinking “data” when you’re making your list, but luckily, we are. AI powers some of the most coveted products this season and that intelligence is fuelled by training data. A lot of electronic devices, or devices with the word ‘’smart’ in the name, were created using data to train the algorithms ...

Blog

The Great AI Adoption Race

When it comes to technology, there’s undoubtedly an ongoing race to be the first with the best, most innovative advancements, and AI is no exception. With a global shift to employees working from home during the pandemic, there was a need to expedite AI-powered projects to ease the transition and establish a new sense of normal in a remote world. ...

Blog

AI Brings People Together

With the holidays upon us, people are gathering from near and far to spend time together and enjoy each other’s company. For some, however it’s not that easy to connect in person making virtual tools powered by AI a simple solution. Thanks to advances in computer vision, search relevance, and automotive technology, there’s plenty of ways people can connect both ...

Blog

Meet the Executive: Sarah Lowe

Life of Sarah While some of us just learn about history through books and TV shows, others live it. Born in Nigeria, Sarah and her mother fled the country during the Biafran war. Because men were not allowed to leave during the war, it would be more than a year before the family was reunited in the UK, where they ...

Blog

Women in AI, Synthetic Data, Bias Reduction, and More!

There’s no shortage of news about companies making innovative moves in AI and Appen is no exception. Q3 headlines in key media publications highlight women in AI, expert tips on managing data and reducing bias, a breakthrough in synthetic data and more! Read on to see what news outlets had to say about Appen last quarter. How ‘Fake’ Data Can ...

Blog

Evaluation, Not Practice, Makes Perfect

Products and programs get launched with bugs all the time–mobile updates to your favorite apps are a perfect example of a deploy and optimize approach. Often there are minor glitches that have little affect on the product or user experience, but sometimes there’s a bug that’s so apparent it takes the world by storm. People wonder how mistakes like these ...

Blog

Pedestrian Recognition — Key to Road Safety

Share the road–not just with other drivers, but with bicyclists, and pedestrians whenever you make turns that have you go over crosswalks or bike lanes. There are plenty of distractions for a driver to contend with on a busy street or even on a quiet neighborhood road. With the development of new AI technologies, cars get an extra set of ...

Blog

How Scary is AI?

It’s high tide for spooky season. People everywhere are watching horror films and going to haunted houses just to scare themselves for entertainment. Controlled creeps can be fun, but things that are out of our control can be genuinely scary. The uncertainty of the future, for example, can be nightmare-inducing for some. For others, something like AI will make their ...

Blog

Meet the Executive: Erik Vogt

Life of Erik – One with Nature Outdoor adventurer on the weekend, AI technology guru during the week–that’s Erik Vogt. Surrounded by woods and beaches in the Chesapeake Bay, a love for the open air and nature has influenced him throughout his life.  His childhood claim to fame is the epic sand sculptures he built during the summer months. As ...

Blog

Monitoring Driver Awareness with AI

“Soon” is the word often echoed when people ask when self-driving cars will be the norm. It’s only natural that there would be some anticipation; self-driving cars allow us to talk, text, or even read a book while “driving,” or order an extra drink at dinner and know, confidently, that you have a safe ride home. While self-driving cars are ...

Blog

Food + AI = The Solution to End World Hunger

Food is something we sometimes take for granted. For many, there is no worry about when we’ll have our next meal. Quite a few people, however, don’t have the same luxury. Around 10% of the world’s population, or 811 million people, go hungry every day. World Food Day is a holiday created by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) branch ...

Blog

Ethics at Every Stage of the AI Lifecycle: Sourcing

Bias it’s everywhere, you can’t avoid it and it isn’t always a bad thing. You can liken data bias to personal preference. Say you and your friend are getting ice cream and you love chocolate, your preference, or in this case your bias, is that chocolate ice cream is superior, so you order that. Yet your friend doesn’t like chocolate ...

Blog

The Power of Translation: Connecting the Past, Present, and Future

More than 7,100 languages are spoken in the world, but 97% of the world’s population speaks only 4% of them. While most of the remaining 96%  are simply spoken by a small group of people, some of them are extinct or near extinction like Larrakia, whose last native speaker passed away over 20 years ago. If this pattern holds true, ...

Blog

Mastering Data for the AI Lifecycle, Sales Strategy, Leveraging AI for Small Business and more!

There’s no shortage of news about companies making innovative moves in AI, and Appen is no exception. Q2 headlines in key media publications highlight AI for small business, expert tips on managing data for the AI lifecycle, a breakthrough in synthetic data and more! Read on to see what news outlets had to say about Appen last quarter. 16 Tips ...

Blog

A Day in the Life of an Appen Crowd Contributor: Hediye Cengiz

You’ve heard us say that quality training data is at the center of AI. The core of that training data is the crowd contributor. More than one million contributors make the work we do possible and help us to produce the highest quality training data for our customers. Our crowd works hand-in-hand with machine learning assistance to efficiently and accurately ...

Blog

Data Quality: The Better the Data, the Better the Model

If your data’s not accurate, your model won’t run…properly, that is. While you may end up with a working model, it won’t function the way it was intended. The quality of your data is arguably the most important aspect of training a machine learning model. No matter how much data you supply the model with, it won’t make much difference ...

Blog

Argh Matey, Let AI Help You Speak a New Language

“If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it” Captain Jack Sparrow. When we think pirates, oftentimes Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow comes to mind. What’s not to love about pirates? They sail the seas looking for buried treasure, drink a lot of rum, and talk in their own pirate language. The best part about being (or ...

Blog

Ethics at Every Stage of the AI Lifecycle: Data Preparation

As AI receives wider market adoption and is implemented as a tool across use cases, more challenges appear. These projects run into concerns that weren’t apparent at infancy of AI–one critical and persisting issue is ethical AI and how to manage bias in data. Data bias is an error that overweighs or underrepresents a certain element in the dataset. When ...

Blog

Meet the Executive: Vasagi Kothandapani

A Career Student of Technology Throughout your working life, you’ll come across all kinds of people–if you’re lucky, some will possess qualities you want to emulate, like passion, drive, determination. These are the qualities of someone who knows exactly what they want, and Vasagi Kothandapani (Vas) is one of them. Appen’s VP of Global Accounts has built her career on ...

Blog

How AI Supports Philanthropic Companies

Supporting a cause that strives to find a cure for illness, builds technology to make living easier, or provides services to those in need, is a noble mission. Whether offering monetary support or time, donors and volunteers often have a lot of questions about the goals, services, and resource allocation of the causes they choose to align with. AI is ...

Blog

Successful AI Models Start with Data Sourcing

Data, by definition, is comprised of stats and facts that have been collected and used for reference and analysis, yet, it’s so much more than that. It’s the building block for machine learning. It fuels our AI models and without it we wouldn’t have the technology we have today.  That’s why data sourcing is a crucial step in managing data ...

Blog

Automated Drive-Thru — Banks, Restaurants, Fast-Foods, Grocery Stores

If you drove through a drive-thru in the 1970’s and again in 2020, the only difference you’d notice is the type of cars in line. Drive-thru technology has been serving us well for over 50 years, but now it’s time to modernize it. With AI and automation, drive-thrus can become a thing of the future. AI has the ability to ...

Blog

Meet the Executive: Mike Frame

Career Background From a young age, Mike was destined to have a career in sales. He started his first business at the age of 10 by creating a lawn mowing company where he lived. On Mike’s first day, he attracted 6 customers, and kept mowing their lawns until he left for college, at which point he passed ownership on to ...

Blog

The 2022 State of AI and Machine Learning Report: What you Need to Know

Our eighth annual edition of The State of AI and Machine Learning Report is here. In this report we continue our evaluation of an industry in constant flux. Our goal is to share the current AI trends and focus of companies, as well as challenges they are experiencing. While the impact of COVID is slowly lessening, it’s still driving an acceleration ...

Blog

Future Ways of Working: How Employee Voices Create Companywide Change

As a AI technology company, we’re constantly adapting to keep up with the latest demands and be on the cutting edge of new innovations in our industry. We would be remiss not to do the same when it comes to how we manage the way we work. With employees returning to office post-pandemic, we observed many in the broader workforce ...

Blog

Revisiting The State of AI and Machine Learning 2021

Looking for the 2022 State of AI and Machine Learning Report? Click here to pre-register and get the report right in your inbox next week! In preparation to share our 8th annual State of AI Report , we’ve looked back on last year’s report to see how much the industry has progressed in a year and if our assumptions were ...

Blog

Training Chatbots to Improve Customer Experience

When it comes to taking care of your customers, one of the most important things is showing them respect as people and respect for their time. That means being prompt and helpful during your interactions—especially if you want them to come back. Society has set the expectation that a customer can ask a question any time, 24/7, and get a ...

Blog

Autonomous Vehicles: One of AI’s Most Challenging Tasks

Autonomous vehicles are said to be the holy grail of the automotive industry, set to revolutionize transportation. The hype for autonomous vehicles just a few years ago was as high as can be—so what happened? Where’s our driverless car revolution that so many companies touted we’d have by 2021? As it turns out, creating a self-driving car is much harder ...

Blog

Meet the Executive: Andrea Clayton

For the past few years, companies have been shifting their rhetoric from what they’re making and selling to what they’re doing to benefit their community and their employees. But, many were just paying lip service to the cause. Not at Appen. We put our actions where our mouth is, starting with the hiring of Chief People Officer Andrea Clayton in ...

Blog

A Healthy Planet is a Happy Planet: How AI can Help Heal the Environment

The earth, the environment, nature is entirely organic and has sustained itself since its formation. Seemingly something so organic has no need for technology, yet, with all the changes going on in this planet, we can look to AI to help put this planet back on track for happy and healthy millennia to come.  A worldwide goal has been set ...

Blog

AI Ethics: How Fair Pay Benefits Our Crowd Contributors

We’re in the data business. Crucial components in the AI lifecycle are data sourcing and data preparation–collecting, cleaning, and labeling data. We create datasets for companies all over the world and we couldn’t do it without the support of our global Crowd. Our contributors are the people who collect and label data, making AI and machine-learning solutions possible. That’s why ...

Blog

Perfecting AI Customer Service in the Hospitality Industry with Data

Hospitality is a very human-centric field. Whether it’s a hotel, restaurant, or place of entertainment, a person will be there accompanying you every step of the way—that’s what we’ve come to expect in customer service. But, just because we’ve become accustomed to it, does that mean it’s the best possible experience? Artificial Intelligence has been taking the hospitality industry to ...

Blog

Meet the Executive: Wilson Pang

Meet: Wilson Pang, Appen Chief Technology Officer When Wilson Pang graduated from Zhejiang University in China, where he grew up, with Bachelor’s and Master degrees in electrical engineering, his career plans didn’t include working in artificial intelligence. Mostly, that’s because artificial intelligence was still the stuff of science fiction. From his early days, Wilson fell in love with technology. In ...

Blog

AI Can Help End World Hunger, One Crop at a Time

World hunger is on top of everyone’s mind–especially with tomorrow being World Hunger Day. The thought of everyone having enough to eat is a comforting one; One that can soon become a reality. As with the introduction of most new things, there’s some hesitation about how much of a role AI should play in something so delicate as having control ...

Blog

Meditation & AI: Creating a Customized Relaxation Experience

It seems these days you can’t scroll a website or a social network without being touched by at least one mental health message. It’s not just you. It’s something everyone can benefit from and given the added stresses of this current constant state of change, companies are tapping into that need with smart technology that can add a little bit ...

Blog

AI is the Key to Convenience

Anyone and everyone can benefit from new technology and who doesn’t love the idea of more convenience, more simplicity and more free time? Add a few extra free minutes to your day or enrich your hobbies with AI powered tools that add a little convenience to your everyday hobbies. From e-book readers to AI powered appliances to plant identifying applications ...

Blog

May the 4th Be with You: The AI Behind Movie Magic

Whether you adore the Cantina Band or prefer to jam out to The Imperial March, we’d like to say… May the 4th be with you. May the 4th (Star Wars Day), is an informal holiday that honors the Star Wars legacy and its undeniable impact on modern filmmaking. Star Wars is credited with a host of innovations in cinema including ...

Blog

Appen in the News: Q1 2022

At Appen, we have a diverse team working on a ton of different, interesting projects. Many of these projects are niche or technical and get written about in various publications across the internet. We put together the biggest hits from Q1 of 2022 to share with you. Here’s everything we’re working on and what everyone has to say about it. ...

Blog

Synthetic Data and its Role in the World of AI

What is Synthetic Data? Synthetic data is artificially created rather than captured from real life and has evolved from machine learning needs for data. Originally, training data had to be obtained to cover every possible scenario to accurately train AI models. If a scenario had not occurred or been captured, there was no data, leaving a huge gap in the ...

Blog

Earth Day 2022: Appen’s Commitment to a Better Environment

It may seem a strange change for the global leader in Data for the AI Lifecycle to pause from our usual AI insights and Data for the AI Lifecycle content to recognize an organic moment such as Earth Day. After all, does data really have an impact on our planet? The short answer is, yes, it does—but we also have an ...

Blog

How Microwork Opportunities and Stablecoin Use Can Benefit People Around the World

One of the center points of technological innovation today is data. But, to gather and annotate that data takes thousands of hours of work. Work that can be done by anyone, anywhere in the world. The internet makes it possible to break up these tasks into thousands of micro-tasks which can then be distributed to workers around the globe. This ...

Blog

What is MLOps?

The exciting wave of developments in AI and machine learning applications might lead you to believe that organizations are also advancing rapidly in their ability to deliver ML products. The reality is, ML internal processes are having trouble catching up with the overall evolution of the industry… but there’s hope in the form of MLOps! MLOps, which stands for machine ...

Blog

Machine Learning Model Validation – The Data-Centric Approach

When it comes to building a machine learning model, all the excitement and energy gets channeled into collecting the data and training the model. What often gets less time in the spotlight is testing the model and validating the results. The right validation techniques help to estimate unbiased generalized model performance and give a better understanding of how the model ...

Blog

Meet the Executive Series: Sujatha Sagiraju

One of our core values at Appen is recognizing and celebrating the people that make the work we do possible. For us, that means writing about and talking about the accomplishments of our people so you can see just how awesome they are. To celebrate our staff, we’ve started a series highlighting a day in the life of an Appen ...

Blog

Make your Speech Recognition System Sing

Your data can be the difference between an efficient and cost-effective voice recognition system and one that doesn’t work very well. When it comes to machine learning, one of the most important components for a successful launch and return on investment is data. If you’re planning to build a voice recognition system or conversational AI, you’ll need a big speech ...

Blog

Machine Learning in Advertising – Predictive Targeting and Moderation

The job of marketers is to get the right product in front of the right consumer at the moment that they’re most likely to buy that product. The ability for marketers to do just that and to drill down to more and more specific niches of customers has grown exponentially over time. AI technology is now being used to help ...

Blog

A Foundation of Women In Tech

This year, the world will be celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8 honoring the impact of women under the theme of #BreaktheBias. While we all celebrate on March 8, at Appen, we strive to take steps every day to make the workplace and tech space more diverse, equitably, and free of bias. We know that the more diverse people ...

Blog

How Artificial Intelligence Data Reduces Overhead Costs for Organizations

When it comes to AI, many companies think of these as projects, with limited scope and short term. They see the high cost of development and deployment and aren’t sure that AI is right for their company. What they don’t recognize off the bat is the long-term goal of reducing costs that may result from applying AI to the right ...

Blog

How Data and Machine Learning Model Choices Impact Deployment Rates

When you’re building a machine learning model, there are a few critical components to consider: calculation power, the algorithm, and the data. Often, a company will focus most of its resources on developing the right, bias-free algorithm and investing in more calculation power. Data is often an after-thought or forgotten entirely until it’s time to run the model. When data ...

Blog

How Data Annotation Platforms Help Improve Machine Learning Models

In recent years, AI has become less of a flashy new idea and more mainstream with a wide variety of businesses implementing AI technology and machine learning models into their business practices. And, as the world generates ever-growing amounts of data, the data you need for your specific use case is likely already out there just waiting for you to ...

Blog

Introducing the New Era of Data for the AI Lifecycle

Data for the AI Lifecycle encompasses four main steps in the continuous cycle to deliver high quality data needed for any AI project. The steps are: data sourcing, data preparation, model training and deployment, and model evaluation by humans. Data sourcing, data preparation and model evaluation are the most laborious and data intense and if not done well, can lead ...

Blog

Expert, Secure and Timely Transcription Services for Conference Calls

Searching online for dial-in conference call transcription reveals countless ‘cheap and cheerful’ DIY options. But if quality matters as well as cost, you’ll need an experienced, specialist transcription provider. Developments in recording technology and speech to text conversion software mean there are plenty of DIY solutions out there if you want to create a written record of your important conference ...

Blog

Meet the Executive Series: Jen Cole

At Appen, we know that we couldn’t do it without the people who work on and in the company each and every day. As a thank you for their hard work, we’re featuring one of our contributors each month through a series of blog posts and we’re introducing you to our executive team. At Appen, we enable the most innovative ...

Blog

Search Relevance — Why No Website or App Should Be Without It

Set the scene: you’re looking for a new item of clothing, so you navigate to your favorite online store. You hop up to the search bar to type in what you’re looking for. What results do you expect? Highly accurate, relevant, and instantaneous results. Customers expect high-quality results no matter what website they’re searching on, what they’re looking for, and ...

Blog

AI vs. Deep Learning vs. Machine Learning: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know

If you’ve spent any time reading articles about tech in the last few years, you’ve likely bumped into some new terms such as artificial intelligence or AI, machine learning or ML, and deep learning. These trending tech terms are often used without explanation of what makes them different. And, to be clear, they’re not interchangeable. As technology becomes more and ...

Blog

The Rise in Computer Vision Datasets & How It Benefits Organizations

One of the most exciting subfields in AI and machine learning today is Computer Vision or CV. CV is used in a diverse number of applications to improve our daily lives, as well as advance science and technology research. These use cases include: Autonomous driving Automatic image captioning Facial recognition and tagging on social media Medical imaging analysis and diagnostics ...

Blog

Top 5 Predictions About the Future of AI and Data

For the past few years, overarching goals with AI have been aspirational. As this new technology exists in the realm of literature and academia and is applied to real-world problems and bent to real-world solutions, there has to be a reckoning with its true capabilities and use cases. For AI, 2021 was a year of over-promising. While potentially underwhelming and ...

Blog

What are Managed Services in AI?

Deploying a well-performing AI model is a complicated, resource-intensive task, so it’s no surprise companies are turning to managed services for assistance. Generally speaking, managed services refers to any end-to-end white glove service. A company can partner with a managed service provider (MSP) for all or part of a given operation via managed services. This concept is now frequently being ...

Blog

Apache Log4J Security Update

The Appen team has taken quick action in relation to resolving the vulnerability advisory related to Log4shell (CVE-2021-44228) which may affect organizations that use vulnerable versions of the Log4j package. The vulnerability is a remote code execution issue in the Apache Log4j logging services application which may affect Java applications. During our security team’s review, malicious or suspicious activity has ...

Blog

What is Synthetic Data?

Everything You Need to Know About Synthetic Data Companies launching artificial intelligence (AI) face a major hurdle in collecting sufficient data for their models. For many use cases, the right data simply isn’t available or is very difficult and expensive to acquire. Missing, or incomplete, data isn’t desirable when creating AI models, but even larger tech companies misstep in this ...

Blog

Natural Language Processing – Connecting The World through Language With AI

As very young children, before we can even walk or talk, we’re listening. We’re hearing the sounds and vocalizations made by other people. We’re attaching those combinations of sounds to meanings, such as ‘mother’ and ‘door’, and learning to read the facial expressions of those around us to deepen our understanding of blocks of words. Then we go to school, ...

Blog

What is Automatic Speech Recognition?

Advances in AI in conjunction with the global pandemic have motivated businesses to enhance their virtual interactions with customers. Increasingly, they’re turning to virtual assistants, chatbots, and other speech technology to power these interactions efficiently. These forms of AI rely on a process known as Automatic Speech Recognition, or ASR. ASR involves the conversion of speech into text; it enables ...

Blog

What is Active Learning?

When and Why You Should Select an Active Learning Approach The key to training any machine learning (ML) model is data. Yet data remains one of the biggest barriers to success for organizations and teams investing in artificial intelligence (AI). For one, you need a lot of it to create high-performing models. And what’s more, you need data that’s accurately ...

Blog

25 Year Anniversary

This year, Appen is celebrating its 25th Anniversary in helping people access reliable training data to deploy their projects with confidence. As we look to the future, we’re also reflecting on the past. Looking back on where we’ve come from is how we can see our growth and can get a clear picture of how many people and companies we’ve ...

Blog

Data Labeling Tools: How to Level up Your Process

From spam filtering to personalized chat bot experiences, AI innovations are becoming a facet of our everyday lives. Most companies, if they haven’t already, are considering adopting AI and machine learning tools in their internal and external processes. What many people don’t realize if they haven’t worked with AI and machine learning technology before is that you can’t just go ...

Blog

Augmented and Virtual Reality AI Data: Powering the Next Big Thing

Augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) are two promising technologies that businesses are keeping an eye on. In fact, nearly three-quarters of industry leaders report that they expect these immersive technologies to be mainstream within the next five years and Goldman Sachs reports that the AR/VR industry will be worth $95 billion by 2025. At the same time, running in parallel ...

Blog

Navigating the World of Machine Learning Datasets: Where to Find the Best Machine Learning Datasets

Many companies are turning to external datasets to launch AI successfully. We are now in an age where finding datasets is getting easier than ever before, and they are getting more and more important for the performance of machine learning models. There are many sites that host repositories for data that covers an incredible range of topics—from images of rare ...

Blog

What is Sensor Fusion?

Sensor Fusion Shapes the Future of Connected Devices Sensors are used in almost every industry now: they’re found in our cars, in our factories, and even in our smartphones. While an individual sensor may provide useful data on its own, imagine the information that could be extracted from combining output from multiple sensors at once. This would give us a ...

Blog

What is Audio Transcription?

How AI is Making Transcription More Efficient Human transcription has been around in some form for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Recently, it’s getting a boost with AI. Transcriptions themselves are the text form of the audio content; they enable a reader to comprehend what was said or what happened during a period of time without having to listen ...

Blog

What is Human-centered AI?

The Future of AI Needs a Human Touch The rapid evolution of AI technology has generated much excitement around its potential to enhance our daily lives. As a result, AI experts are having frequent conversations around the best ways to leverage AI in our society and out of this dialogue has emerged the human-centered AI approach. Human-centered AI isn’t about ...

Blog

What are Data Collection Solutions?

How to Collect Data Efficiently and Responsibly for Your AI Initiatives Data collection continues to be a major bottleneck for teams building artificial intelligence (AI). The reasons vary: there may be a lack of sufficient data for a use case, new machine learning (ML) techniques like deep learning require more data, or teams don’t have the right processes in place ...

Blog

The Basics of Small Data: Actionable Data Provide a New Path Forward in AI

You may have heard the buzzword “big data” in the context of AI, but what about small data? Whether you’re aware of it or not, small data is all around you: it powers online shopping experiences, airline recommendations, weather reports, and more. Small data is data that’s in an accessible and actionable format and easily comprehensible by humans. Data scientists ...

Blog

Verbatim vs. Intelligent Verbatim: Which Transcript Style to Choose, and When

Transcripts can be created in a range of styles and formats, depending on the scenario. Verbatim and intelligent verbatim are the two most common, but in order to choose the right one, it’s important to understand the differences between them. When it comes to creating a written record of the spoken word, the finished transcript can vary greatly depending on ...

Blog

Data Science and Machine Learning Automation: What to Know About the State of Automation in AI

In the last decade, there have been many developments in the automation of artificial intelligence (AI) building. Frequently in dialogue about the future of AI, you may hear reference to data science automation and machine learning automation used interchangeably. In reality, these terms have distinct definitions: the current automated machine learning (known as AutoML) goals refer specifically to the automation ...

Blog

Navigating the Transcription Process

Seven Simple Steps to Getting the Best Written Record As remote working becomes increasingly prevalent, more and more organizations are finding they need accurate written records of their virtual meetings and conference calls. Whether you are a first-timer or an existing customer, have you ever wondered how the transcription process works? Here’s Appen’s guide to what happens when. 1. Identify ...

Blog

Don’t Start from Scratch When Building Machine Learning Models

How Leveraging Training Data with Pre-Trained Models Can Accelerate Your AI Projects It would probably be a safe bet to assume that most of the AI you’ve interacted with was built using supervised learning. Supervised learning, which is essentially building machine learning (ML) models from scratch, has been the key driver of artificial intelligence (AI) development so far, motivated by ...

Blog

The Role of Data in Responsible AI: Data Decisions that Shape the Future of Ethical AI

There’s no question that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue its rapid evolution in the coming years and become increasingly interconnected with our daily lives. The onus is now on companies to approach AI with a responsible lens in order to maximize transparency, reduce bias, and guide ethical applications of the technology. AI that works well, after all, works equitably for ...

Blog

What is Optical Character Recognition?

How Artificial Intelligence Gives OCR a Boost Artificial intelligence is transforming the capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) tools. An area of computer vision, OCR processes images of text and converts that text into machine-readable forms. In other words, it takes handwritten or typed text within physical documents and converts them into digital formats. In the 1990s, many business owners ...

Blog

What is AutoML?

Automated Machine Learning Uses and Approaches Explained As organizations seek to use machine learning in more diverse use cases, the amount of pre and post data processing and optimization scales exponentially. The difficulty to hire enough people to do all the tasks associated with advanced machine learning models makes  automated tools for machine learning a critical component for the future ...

Blog

Where eBay Went Right—and Wrong—With AI: What You Measure Matters

The following is adapted from Real World AI. I joined eBay back in 2006, and in 2009, the company was in very bad shape. Its share price was at a historical low, well off its near-$24 historical high; it was cutting costs, growth was negative, market share was shrinking, and the technology team wasn’t empowered to innovate. Put simply, the ...

Blog

The Current State of AI 2021: Report Now Available

What You Need to Know About the Seventh Annual Industry Report In our seventh edition of the State of AI and Machine Learning Report, we continue to evaluate an industry that is changing rapidly year-over-year. Our goal with the report is to provide a current picture of the trends, priorities, and challenges faced by businesses building AI technology. Once again, ...

Blog