Breaking News
Hellon funded for Finnish-speaking AI
Finnish service design company Hellon has been funded by Business Finland to teach its artificial intelligence, AINO, to understand Finnish and transform customer service globally.
Hellon was granted nearly 500 000 euros as part of Business Finland’s AI Business programme, which it will use to develop unique artificial intelligence technology that can understand the Finnish language and recognise a person’s emotional state and experience from speech.
The Finnish company looks to use the technology to shake up customer service starting with Finland, before applying it to other languages for big companies worldwide to use to improve their dialogue with customers.
“According to the research we have done, artificial intelligence understanding the Finnish language will not be born at the hands of artificial intelligence giants, but rather we need Finnish companies such as Hellon to explore and develop it,” saysOuti Keski-Äijö, head of Business Finland’s AI Business programme.
Major global actors in artificial intelligence, such as Google, Amazon and Baidu, are at the moment focusing on the world’s biggest markets, where common languages such as English, Chinese and Spanish are generally spoken.
Hellon, on the other hand, wants to apply the technology to regions where the world’s 20 most common languages are not primarily used, which still represents a two billion-people market opportunity.
Interested to learn more about Hellon? Read our feature here.
Good News from Finland is published by Finnfacts, which is part of Business Finland.