Asset Bank is a leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution from Bright Interactive, used by 20 of the FTSE 100 companies and over 500 organizations around the world.
Martin Wilson, co-founder of Bright Interactive and founder of DAM Plus, has over 20 years of experience in the software development industry. He conceived Asset Bank and managed its growth into one of the leading enterprise DAM systems on the market.
Challenge
Asset Bank is a leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that provides enterprises with highly-configurable solutions to manage their media libraries. As one of the industry’s innovators, Bright Interactive wanted to build artificial intelligence into their DAM product and leverage image auto-tagging to create a better product and user experience for their customers.
1. FAST DEVELOPMENT: What’s the best way to quickly build visual recognition into your product without breaking the bank?
Getting started with visual recognition and machine learning can be both challenging and expensive. Bright Interactive needed a cost-effective and fast way to build very advanced artificial intelligence technology into its product without incurring technical or financial debt.
2. IMPROVE ACCURACY: How do you ensure that your visual recognition results are accurate, relevant, and get better over time?
Organizations who use DAM solutions are very particular about their keywords and taxonomies. One brand’s “trash” keyword could be another brand’s “treasure,” so to speak. Bright Interactive needed a visual recognition solution that was not only accurate but also adaptable to its customers’ needs.
“DAM applications will need to start adopting machine learning and visual recognition technologies in order to stay innovative and competitive in the market.” – Martin Wilson, Bright Interactive Co-Founder
Solution
Bright Interactive uses Clarifai in their DAM products to automatically tag and keyword images, adding value and saving time for clients.
Bright Interactive launched two pilot apps incorporating Clarifai’s visual recognition technology to auto-tag and keyword images. The first app is built into Bright Interactive’s flagship Asset Bank DAM product and integrated with Asset Bank’s REST API to add tags automatically to assets as they are uploaded to the platform. The second app is a standalone product with its own user interface called Quicktagger, which is designed to be used with any DAM solution and allows clients to change, accept, or reject automatically suggested tags. With these two pilots in place, Bright Interactive can deliver added value to their clients and save time traditionally spent manually keywording images.
Implementation
Minimum costs, maximum results
Building and testing a new product feature can be costly, both in terms of time and money, particularly when it comes to cutting edge technologies that require a lot of infrastructure and expertise. Bright Interactive worked with the Clarifai API to avoid technical debt and launch two pilot apps in less than a month, bringing their new products to market in a cost-effective and expedient way.
“Clarifai’s API is dead simple – here’s an image, give me some tags, done. It only took a day or two to finish the first prototype of our apps, and less than a month for both apps to be ready for clients to start using.”
Personalized results and tags
Clarifai’s core model can recognize over 11,000 general concepts, which is more than enough for many clients to extract value from the results. For example, the general tags for “outdoors” and “indoors” are very meaningful for a travel and tourism client. In Bright Interactive’s Asset Bank DAM product, these general tags are automatically added via the Clarifai API as users upload images.
However, many brands have unique taxonomies and keywords they want to use. For example, a major brand might wish to identify their headquarters by name, rather than the general “building” tag. The obvious next step for Bright Interactive’s pilot is to incorporate Clarifai’s custom training feature, which will be made widely available in 2016.
“Today, image recognition technology is at a point where many of our clients should find its results useful, particularly in the travel and tourism industry. The next evolution is to make the technology even more personalized for clients’ unique needs through custom models and tags.”
Getting smarter, together
In its Quicktagger app, Bright Interactive built a user interface that allows clients to change, accept, or reject recommended tags. This feedback can then be returned to Clarifai and used to make the algorithm deliver even better results. While Bright Interactive is not yet sending feedback from its pilot apps, they believe that feedback loops like this are essential to get better results for their clients.
“The feedback resource that Clarifai currently supports and the upcoming custom training feature provide the potential for us to teach the algorithm to deliver more accurate results as we use the API. It makes Clarifai a more compelling technology for us than the other APIs that don’t have the ability to get smarter the more you use them.”
DIY with Clarifai
Now that you’ve been inspired by Bright Interactive’s innovation, it’s time to build your own app. Clarifai’s core model includes tags for over 11,000 concepts you can apply to your business. All it takes is three simple lines of code – sign up for a developer API account to get started for free!
