Sortal is changing the way people find and use visual information such as photos, videos and graphics - and they’re getting international attention while doing it.
The Brisbane business was recently awarded a Good Design Award - an international recognition of their human centric design - and was named the merit recipient for the Startup of the Year 2019 at the state iAwards.
Acting as an enhanced memory for individuals and a collective corporate memory in workplaces, Sortal makes digital media highly searchable and discoverable through a trainable personal assistant that learns human meaning derived from data.
“It only takes Sortal 0.5 seconds to find an image you’re looking for,” co-founder and CEO Majella Edwards says.
“Our solution analyses images and videos to find very specific things from hundreds of thousands of files.”
Since Sortal started in 2017, the team including Edwards, co-founder and CTO Ashley Davis, and Project Lead Dr Amanda Moffatt have been developing their technology, and are now working with a number of pilot customers to refine their offering.
“We’ve been through a number of prototypes and tested our technology with a wide variety of end users. We’re proud to be building a system that is human centric. It’s an innovation that learns people, so that people do not have to learn the system. We've recently assembled an Advisory Board of six to help us as the startup transitions into the next phase of our journey,” Edwards says.
This hard work has evolved to deliver a highly trainable search engine and personal assistant, which learns and adjusts to workplaces, teams and individuals.
“One of the exciting things our technology can do is allow people to teach and correct it, which allows almost limitless customisation,” she says.
The team is passionate about the use of AI for social good, in particular for improvement in quality of life.
“As we apply machine learning to new human frontiers, we carefully evaluate the ethics of our technology. It's taken us two years to get to this point, and this approach has been a fundamental part of our development so far,” Edwards says.
It’s also apparent that this technology is needed now more than ever.
“We are creating and consuming content on a scale like never before,” she says.
“People are potentially dealing with hundreds of thousands of digital files in their lifetime. This has become so problematic - it’s humanly impossible to process vast data sets to find anything quickly and easily. To give an example, in 2017, more than 1.2 trillion digital images were created.”
Visuals need to be discoverable as businesses and individuals exponentially increase their digital footprint and seek to retain, or grow the value of their intellectual property.
To date Sortal has been bootstrapped, and is now starting to see early revenue.
With global expansion on the horizon the Sortal team will soon look for funding opportunities.
Having already applied their intuitive digital asset management technology seamlessly into a corporate business environment they are now working towards a solution for individuals living with dementia and their families.
“It's a really exciting time, there is so much technology can do to help people experience the best that life has to offer.
“We are also investigating how Sortal might assist people with severe brain trauma.”
