Recently we were contacted by Veritone to request an analyst briefing. At first I wasn’t sure that this was in the scope of our focus at Deep Analysis, but it turned out I was wrong. In short, Vertione is a publicly listed (NASDAQ – VERI) artificial intelligence vendor based in Southern California with roots in media and entertainment. Indeed it is still well known in that world, enabling media firms, studios, and sports organizations to analyze and monetize their digital assets.
An AI Operating System
However, over the past few years, Veritone has grown in ambition and positions themselves as providing the first ‘Operating System for Artificial Intelligence’. It’s a grand claim, but on close inspection, it is one with some merit. Veritone provides a platform for pre-integrated cognitive capabilities, ranging from its own home-grown AI systems to a plethora of third-party options, all accessible via an API. We can argue the semantics of it being called an operating system, but it is certainly an interesting development and integration platform for AI. One where you can leverage all the platforms capabilities to either develop a new application or to integrate and expand your existing AI applications. Many AI applications leverage multiple cognitive tools, from computer, speech, text and facial recognition to specialist subforms of machine learning. The job of integrating, managing and leveraging those different components into an application that serves your particular business needs is reliant on your development skills and IT resources. With Veritone can build your application as a standalone instance with one set of API’s, and leverage Veritone to manage all those providers and instances on its platform. This platform (or operating system) has taken Veritone beyond media and entertainment and into Government, Legal and Regulatory Compliance.
eDiscovery
This unified platform approach is interesting in and of itself, but what triggered our discussions with the firm was the launch of a new AI application called ‘Veritone Illuminate’ for legal early case reviews. Veritone has in fact been in the Legal sector for several years now, though primarily through a relationship with eDiscovery vendor Relativity, enabling users to make better sense of and to cull down the audio and video in case reviews. For example, if they want to analyze phone calls, they can automatically convert those to text and add redactions, etc. Now though Veritone has released a standalone offering (still in Beta) of its own, outside of the Relativity relationship for early case assessment work.
Real World Challenges
In our experience, one of the biggest challenges of eDiscovery is the sheer volume of material that has to be processed. That can be difficult enough to plow through high numbers of emails and documents, but the increased volume of audio and video files being created and stored today have made the challenge all the more difficult. Many organizations can find it cumbersome and expensive to move all of the audio and video files, often via a managed service provider to an eDiscovery platform. Until now there has been little option, but this new product from Veritone allows for the audio and video (and text) to be translated, text extracted, pinpoint elements and concepts in the text, and interrogate much earlier in the process than was previously feasible. In short, you can cull a lot of the files early on and only export those files of relevance to an eDiscovery system. That makes much sense to us. eDiscovery is a daunting and expensive activity, culling irrelevant data from the cache as early as possible is logical, but audio and video, in particular, has been challenging to cull early since the context and relevance is encoded within the file. It’s only in Beta release, but if Veritone can deliver on its promise than that is of value to many case review situations.
Our Take:
The operating system for AI approach should be of interest to organizations intent on developing their own AI solutions. It appears to be a pragmatic and practical solution to simplifying the sheer complexity of pulling together, configuring and managing the many moving parts that advanced AI applications are built with. At the other end of the spectrum, the Veritone Illuminate simplifies the use and leverages the value of AI in an equally practical way for early legal case reviews.
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