Intento Goes beyond Machine Translation to Become a Universal Gateway to Best of Breed AI

Localization, OCR, Speech Transcription, Content Moderation, Content Ingestion, Customer Support are all essential aspects of running an organization, each of them a multi-billion dollar, labor-intensive business process outsourcing industry.

Today AI can be a huge asset for companies to help them do more on the same budget, accomplishing much more with technology than they could by adding either in-house or outsourced talent. Studies show that adding AI in the mix yields at least 30 percent ROI in most cases, but at the same time only 17 percent of companies actually manage to employ AI (The 2017 Deloitte State of Cognitive Survey). A significant factor holding companies back from leveraging this AI opportunity is the fact that a proper solution requires deep evaluation and often a combination of systems from multiple AI vendors, as well as the necessity of having to integrate it with a legacy enterprise systems.

Today, Intento, a cohort company at the elite Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator and recognized leader in evaluation and procurement of Machine Translation services,introduces its AI Gateway as a universal platform to help all types of companies discover, evaluate and implement a range of AI solutions for content processing. The technology will now be available for multiple AI intents such as sentiment analysis, image tagging, OCR, speech transcription, text classification and more. (See demo here.

Founded in by in 2016 by Grigory Sapunov and  Konstantin Savenkov, Intento AI Middleware allows AI to be easily accessible for most companies now struggling to find a solution which works, without having to build in-house. Intento is the first vendor-agnostic AI platform that radically simplifies building AI solutions for content processing. Intento helps to hire the best Cognitive Intelligence for businesses, providing access to multiple vendors via a single API integration, with up to 23x better performance/price efficiency compared to an individual vendor in the marketplace today.

A vendor-agnostic platform, Intento provides a uniform interface to discover, evaluate and use Cognitive AI solutions. Originally targeted at the language translation services market, Intento started offering its SaaS solution in 2017 and now has more than 30 clients among top-tier language service providers and the world’s largest ecommerce, travel and content publishing companies. These companies use the Intento Machine Translation middleware to process more than 1 billion words per month.

“Our platform removes the complexity from evaluation and integration of AI solutions. We provide a simple and elegant API to build universal connectors for enterprise software. Every request is routed to the best model in real time, optimizing for performance, price or latency. This way, we enable hybrid AI solutions, relying on all major providers, such as Google Cloud AI, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Amazon Web Services and IBM Watson, and many indie AI vendors,” said Konstantin Savenkov, Co-founder and CEO, Intento.

Implementing an AI solution requires deep evaluation and often a combination of systems from multiple AI vendors. The quality of AI often depends on how similar the data used by the vendor to train its models is to the data to be processed. The lack of comparison and evaluation may lead to very costly mistakes, discovered only after integrating the solution into enterprise systems. The Intento platform simplifies the entire process by providing the same vendor-agnostic interface to all those services, eliminating the cumbersome process of executing all different integrations with AI service APIs.

“Many companies fail when they try to procure AI the same way they purchase software. With enterprise software, you typically go through some quick market research and select one brand based on features and price and expect to go with this brand for years. That just does not work with AI,” said Dr. Savenkov. “You think that the AI is not there yet and lose your competitive edge. It’s extremely expensive to find AI that works for you on your own, let alone build a multi-vendor solution. Our platform allows you to quickly build and manage a portfolio of the best-of-breed AI models tailored for your business, with no additional headcount and with a ridiculously low time to market.”

AI vendor performance for a specific use depends on their training data, which is unknown and changes frequently. Given 11x difference in prices among vendors of similar AI services, this may lead up to 95% waste of resources, which we demonstrate in our public evaluation reports.

A Berkeley SkyDeck startup, Intento offers a full range of services for companies implementing AI into their products by benchmarking cognitive services for particular business use cases and providing access to multiple models via a single API integration. Intento handles all integration and maintenance so clients may go without a dedicated AI and engineering team for those issues.