Deepfake – it’s incredible technology that can create life-like replicas of celebrities so accurately that audiences often can’t tell the difference between the original and the deepfake. Harnessing the power of this technology, artificial intelligence company Crowd Media (ASX: CM8) has made a technological breakthrough which could soon see the tech used to solve real world problems in healthcare and eCommerce.
Since commencing as CEO in September 2021, Idan Schmorak has hit the ground running at Crowd Media, so far as to bring the timeline for a commercial product forward.
The end of 2022 has long been flagged as the timeline for Crowd to commercialise their Talking Head platform which creates digital avatars as conversational AI solutions. These avatars are digitally designed to look and sound like real people while their conversational capabilities are powered by Crowd’s AI to offer customer service as if conversing with the real person in real time.
Schmorak however, has flagged a commercial product as early as March 2022, 9 months ahead of schedule where new R&D developments in deepfake have saved Crowd substantial time and money.
Core to Crowd’s development of the Talking Head platform has been the restructure from his legacy mobile tech business to a fully-fledged AI company focused on conversational AI solutions to introduce a new age of human-computer interaction.
For the quarter ended 30 September 2021, Crowd reported $1.52 million in customer receipts which just about covered all of their R&D and operating expenses for the Talking Head platform. This resulted in net cash outflows of just $133k for the quarter which was a 57% improvement on the previous year.
With this improved bottom line, Crowd had $2.33m of cash on hand and minimal debt ($600K) which gives the Company a long runway to commercialise their Talking Head platform and beyond.
eCommerce is the primary market for the Talking Head platform where brands and celebrities will be able to create avatars to converse with fans while pushing commercial partners. Doing this, they will be able to utilise Crowd’s AI to converse with fans and customers at scale to have hundreds of conversations at a time while promoting products, accepting payment and processing dispatch all within a Facetime interface.
Looking deeper into the tech and beyond its materialistic applications, Crowd first advanced its potential use in healthcare through a Heads of Agreement signed with South African healthcare company PangeaMed in June 2021.
Those discussions have now progressed to Crowd creating a Proof of Concept for a medical-assistive product that draws upon Crowd’s AI.
PangeaMed’s focus is on providing healthcare solutions in the developing world using technology to increase access, drive better patient outcomes and facilitate cost savings. Given the remoteness of many locations in Africa that require extensive travel to access Western Medicine, an AI-powered telehealth solution could potentially save millions of lives.
“Crowd is entering 2022 with an improved operating cash flow and fresh wind in the sails on all fronts – on the development side, with a newly formed R&D team on agile development mode in order to roll out a first version of our talking head system,” said Crowd Media CEO, Idan Schmorak.
“With a special focus on commercialization, we are using our cutting edge tech stack to release a light-weight, fast, versatile system that will allow us to deploy our technology in various use cases expanding our prospective client list.”
Schmorak is hopeful of finalising a commercial agreement for their telehealth solutions by December 2021.
A 2020 Markets and Markets research report estimates that the global conversational AI market, including chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants, is expected to grow at an annual rate of 22% which will see the market valued at USD $14 billion by 2025.
A similar study by Gartner estimates that 70% of white-collar workers will interact regularly with conversational platforms by 2022.
Alfred Chan is a Business Reporter at The Sentiment specialising in ASX-listed small cap companies, a bloodstock enthusiast and former equities analyst.
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