- Media monitoring tool was launched in April
- CEO says data is central to digital marketing
An Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data company called Seriti Insights has developed a new media monitoring tool aimed at improving digital marketing and providing online customer feedback for companies to improve efficiency and manage customer perceptions.
“Seipone.ai is a media monitoring tool that is able to process natural languages to comprehend public perceptions about companies on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter,” the Chief Executive and Founder of Serite Insights, Nomsa Makgabenyana, said in an interview. Makgabenyana pointed out that in a world where customers are always making comments about services on social media, they found it fit that as a start-up specialising in AI and big data, they create a solution that will serve the local market while creating value for both companies and their clientele.
“From a business side, the intention was to make it market-fit with advertisers,” she said. “Seiponi.ai is basically a solution that gathers data that reflects people’s emotions. It shows if they are happy or sad about a particular brand.” the recently launched solution is an addition to the many media monitoring tools She explained that the distinguishing feature of Seipone.ai is a robotic-like mechanism that systematically builds big data platforms and helps analyse natural language processing with real time information and reports from companies’ data.
Makgabenyana said the AI product, which was created in 2019, has been received well in the market, giving them the hope of scaling up business operations. Given the feedback from the niche market, the team intends to extend operations to neighbouring South Africa, the East African and then Rwanda. “We are in the process of building a prototype to understand Zulu and Xhosa languages,” Makgabenyana said, adding that the idea is to test the product in South Africa at the end of 2022 and then enter the market in 2023.
Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Kagiso Mpa, said Serite Insights was formed to help organisations find value in their data. He noted that although Seiponi is not 100 percent accurate, with more data being fed to it and it being trained, it moves closer to depicting human minds. “We are moving into developing data solutions because Seiponi.ai is more of a robot that can extract emotions from natural language used across social media platforms,” Mpa said. “It summarises all the insights and organisations are thus able to get feedback on their products.”
The data scientist said they are targeting sectors like telecommunications, big food retailers, restaurants and marketing units of The founders of Seipone.ai are also hoping to be able to service government departments, which are often criticised for providing poor service. As an AI innovation, Seipone.ai fills the gap of natural language processing and complements other media listening tools at a time when the African market has more versatile consumers.
