CeADAR creates video summarisation engine to tackle information overload

CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI, is developing AI-powered automated video summaries to tackle information overload and shortening attention spans in a €450,000 project.

Video summarisation engine to tackle information overload

Giyst (pronounced like gist) has been incubated in CeADAR as a start-up company for the last year and uses Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to create summarised videos for business, education and other markets.

Giyst

The summary generated by giyst is a fully-edited automated video that can, for example, transform a 50-minute lecture, speech or training module into a five-minute video of the essential information in an instant. The summarization engine also provides a transcript.

Video summarization as a service is considered to have huge potential across a number of sectors as companies increasingly use videos for their sales, marketing, events, communication and training programmes.

Giyst is aiming to transform the global enterprise video platform (EVP) market by enhancing the user experience through faster content discovery and allowing people to get to the point as quickly as possible.

EVP Market

The EVP market is estimated to be worth $25.60 billion globally by 2025 (CAGR of 9.3%). Video is also experiencing huge growth as a tool to enhance the learning process in the education sector.

But consumers of video content in business, education and other sectors are struggling to keep up with the number of videos they are expected to watch for work or education purposes.

Giyst has identified information overload as a critical daily issue for businesses, agencies and consumers. Currently, 82% of all created content is in video form but only 24% of people will get to the end of a video if it is over 20 minutes long.

In addition, workers are wasting time by spending 2.5 hours a day trying, and often failing, to find the right content, and shortening attention spans are affecting our ability to consume information.

The Team in CeADAR and Giyst

The team in CeADAR comprises co-founders Colm Murphy and Avril Power, who are in charge of business and commercial development, Sean Mahon, a data scientist with expertise in natural language processing, Hanene Jemoui, who is the software architect of the project, and Dr Ricardo Simon Carbajo, who is the lead of the project and co-founder of giyst.

The giyst team is now focused on further enhancing the summarization engine and converting current trial partners to customers, with a view to going for seed funding by Q4 this year.

Dr Ricardo Simon Carbajo, Head of Innovation & Development at CeADAR and giyst project lead, said:

“CeADAR, as Ireland’s Digital Innovation Hub in Artificial Intelligence, is now creating and incubating start-ups which seek to tackle key society and industry challenges through the application of AI. The giyst start-up project addresses one of the main challenges when consuming digital content, i.e. how to get the gist of a video in such a short time that suits our daily digital content consumption requirements and constraints.

“Nowadays, the latest advances in deep learning, especially the so-called transformers, are enabling us to train and fine-tune customised models for natural language understanding and summarization; this technology is at the core of giyst.”

Avril Power, Co-Founder of giyst, said:

“We can’t keep up with the amount of video we are required to watch, and we can’t keep tuned in, because we haven’t got the attention span. On top of that, we also can’t find the right content because of information overload. You might start watching a video that you think is valuable and then you realise it isn’t the topic that you wanted.

“By providing instant, automated video summaries of the essence of content, giyst drives four times more content discovery and maximises audience retention by at least 40% thereby creating efficiencies for consumers and the businesses that provide them with video content.”

Dave Malone, Member Services & Marketing Director of trial partner Irish Executive Institute, said:

“We are a bespoke executive-level network for senior leaders of Ireland’s biggest and most progressive organisations, and we run over 50 virtual and in-person events every year with strategic business content. Our members are very busy, so we are always looking for new ways to get them to engage with our content. We are excited about piloting content video summaries for our vast library of knowledge experts. We are confident that it will boost discovery and engagement. To date, feedback has been great.”