Appen to pay up to $428m for Figure Eight to ramp up automation
Search and language data services company Appen says its takeover of Silicon Valley-based rival Figure Eight, whose software can annotate videos like dash-cam footage 50 times quicker than a human, will accelerate its push to serve the burgeoning self-driving car market.
The high-flying Appen, which has delivered investors a 158 per cent share price lift in the past year, already has a crowd of 1 million people who work from their homes and cafes creating data sets for the world's biggest tech companies. The workers use specific language to describe images, videos and text. These data sets are then used to train artificial algorithms for everything from image recognition software to making search engine results more relevant. But the process has been largely manual.
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