Startup Circle: How is Wobot Intelligence changing the activity recognition industry?

In manual monitoring, a person would go to audit a place just once a week or month, and that created room for lots of human bias in the manual audits. Wobot Intelligence enables vision-based process compliance. Wobot's deep learning computer vision tool plugs into existing cameras and helps in monitoring industry-specific SOPs. The AI identifies people, their activities, and objects on the basis of pre-defined rules that help detect anomalies. Wobot has helped organizations in the Food, Retail, and Manufacturing sectors to reduce the cost of monitoring employees, risk of non-compliance, pilferage, and improve productivity.

Here is a conversation with Mr Adit Chhabra, CEO & CoFounder, Wobot Intelligence, to know more about the startup.

What is Wobot.ai about?

Wobot enables vision-based process compliance by plugging its AI-first SaaS tool into existing CCTV cameras. It has helped organizations in Food, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Retail, and Pharma to reduce the cost of monitoring, risk of non-compliance, and improve customer NPS.

Customers can choose from industry-specific process compliance modules like hygiene, workforce/workplace safety, customer SOPs, and more. This allows for existing cameras to automatically list and deliver deviations to relevant stakeholders as well as provide a dashboard with insights. Wobot currently provides solutions to several organizations like IRCTC, Rebel Foods, CureFit, Kitopi, Travel Food Services, Burger Singh, G4S, Max Estates, Blue Tokai, Apparel Group and Smartworks among others.

How did you come up with the idea behind Wobot.ai?

The idea for the company came about when we realized that organizations were going through the process of monitoring their operations manually. Essentially an auditor would inspect a place manually just once a week/month, making the whole process highly inefficient and increasing the chances of human errors and biases drastically. At that time we were in the process of building an audit and inspection app that would digitize these manual audits.

Through this process, we started understanding the different checklist items that were needed to be audited/monitored for different industries. For example, the hygiene model would require PPE monitoring, sanitization activity monitoring, hand wash monitoring, etc. We also realized how CCTV’s were capturing huge amounts of data and how it could be used to make the process of Video Monitoring more efficient.

Therefore, in step one we digitized audits and inspections and gained industry knowledge in step two, we converted these checklists to Computer Vision models for CCTV across different industries.

What is your business/market growth?

Wobot has over 10,000+ units today, across multiple users, organizations in retail, food, hospitality, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals with clients in India, the Middle East, and is also expanding in the USA.

What is the Plug'n'Play technology?

Plug and Play is a term used to describe our industry-standard models that can ride on top of existing CCTV cameras. These could be deployed via an edge box or cloud.

How do you manage and track hygiene solutions?

Wobot’s deep learning Video Analytics tool plugs into existing CCTV cameras and keeps a check on Process compliance (example - hygiene and safety) by identifying people, objects, and their activities. It works in the following steps:

1. Organizations choose the use cases for a camera for tracking.

2. They then add the employees responsible for taking actions on the detection of violation for these areas and complete the setup.

3. When people come in the view of the camera their activities are identified against the use cases (SOPs) set up for that camera.

4. Violations (example 20 seconds hand wash) goes to relevant managers via in-app notifications, emails, and SMS, including red-flagged video clips for the missed compliance instances.

Wobot’s Hygiene and Safety Suite is able to detect:

1. Personal Protective Equipment (including Hairnets, gloves, masks, aprons, uniforms).

2. Floor mopping, deep cleaning compliance and other sanitation activities.

3. Employees hand-wash compliance and,

4. Social distancing among employees.

Tell us about the live streaming feature.

Hotels, Restaurants, and Retailers can primarily use the Live streaming feature. Thus, they can bring transparency in their operations with the end customers.

As a customer checks a particular delivery kitchen or logs on to an App to book a hotel or fires up an offline retailer’s App for shopping; in all these scenarios; it is now possible to showcase the live video feed from the CCTV camera set up in the premises. The feed is live streamed through an embedded (in an App or website) media player with a minimal delay. The stream is fully encrypted and secure.

For Hotels, this option in the App can help increase the conversion rate. Customers can now have a bird’s eye view of the common areas of the hotel like the lobby, reception area, and the elevator areas. Clean and hygienic premises will, further, help expedite the decision-making process of the customer.

The same feature is also available for offline retailers. Moreover, it can be useful for gymnasiums and healthcare centres. It is useful in their apps or websites. With the help of the live streaming feature, customers can see the interiors of an outlet. They can also see the centre they would like to visit. Thus, they can be certain of the practices that the outlet follows inside the premises.

By leveraging Wobot’s platform, an organization in the Food, Hospitality and the Retail industry can truly sustain a customer's trust by providing them with full transparency as an integral part of the customer experience, as we move into a post-COVID-19 affected world.

Activity recognition is not a familiar concept. What is its future?

Activity Recognition allows us to understand the movements of people and objects. This directly helps us in building more granular use cases. For example: Imagine monitoring productivity of a worker on an assembly line; or monitoring activities of warehouse employees at one of the docks. Activity Recognition provides for understanding a process. This is better than just plain object recognition and helps in understanding much more granular details.

Wobot’s Activity Recognition architecture also focuses on several industry-specific human-related activities.

What are your Post-COVID plans?

We see cameras as the third eye for enabling remote monitoring of businesses and processes. In the immediate term, we will continue to add more use cases for different sectors and expand in newer markets. Further, in the long term, our vision is to create a seamless and transparent workplace with 100% process compliance. We see the underutilized cameras becoming this smart and unbiased feedback provider for staff and members on the ground.

Funding

We have raised a pre-Series A round from Sequoia India. We will use these funds for global expansion and strengthening of our proprietary technology platform. It will also help us make some key executive appointments; expand our sales and marketing efforts. It will also help broaden and accelerate product development to cater to more use cases and customers.

Wobot Intelligence has previously raised a seed round funding from Titan Capital as well.