Defined.ai to Play Significant Role in Accelerat.ai, the Government of Portugal-Approved AI Initiative

Accelerat.ai is a government-backed consortium with a €48 million (~$51 million) investment to accelerate Portugal’s digital transformation

Defined.ai (formerly DefinedCrowd), the leading provider of data, models and tools for Artificial Intelligence, announced its role in Accelerat.ai, which the Portuguese government fully approved . Portugal is one of the first European Union countries to implement the Covid 2019 Recovery and Resilience Plan and the Digital Transformation Mandate by the European Union, which Accelerat.ai is a part of.

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Accelerat.ai is a consortium of Portuguese companies backed by the government, with an investment of €48 million (~$51 million) to speed up the digital transformation of Portugal’s public and private sectors.

The project, born from the EU Digital Compass 2030 initiative, is financed partly through a €16 billion ($17 billion) award granted to Portugal as part of the initiative. It is also the first of many projects from Portugal’s Center of Excellence for AI.

The mandate of the consortium is to make it easier to develop trustworthy AI apps and use unbiased data in European Portuguese. Accelerat.ai works on the European Portuguese language problem, which has yet to be effectively addressed well in the field of Conversational AI, especially in the public sector and industry-specific domains as the big tech companies usually focus on other markets. If a developer wants to use voice interfaces in the Portuguese market, they have to use APIs in English or Brazilian Portuguese, which is not what the Portuguese people prefer.

Today, António Costa Silva, Minister of Economy and Sea, Sir John O’Reilly, President of the Jury, Thierry Breton, European Commissioner, and António Costa, Prime Minister of Portugal, will officially announce the winners of the public audit and contest, including Accelerat.ai as the winner of a process that began exactly one year ago.

Defined.ai will play a leading role in Accelerat.ai, a consortium of companies that includes Talkdesk, Devscope, Instituto Superior Tecnico de Lisboa (Inesc id), Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Clarin, NOS, IBM, Microsoft, and KPMG. Interested clients include Caixa Geral de Depositos, Novo Banco, Santander, SPMS/SNS (Healthcare Ministry), AMA (Digital Transformation), Social Security Ministry, EDP (electricity and gas), the Telco NOS, the popular Retail provider Worten, and the Insurance company Fidelidade.

Dr. Daniela Braga, Founder and CEO of Defined.ai, was a key player in proposing the creation of a Center of Excellence in AI in Europe and starting the Accelerat.ai consortium and project. (Defined.ai gives AI builders the data they need to train their models.)

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This ambitious project is aimed at dramatically improving private and public customer service through virtual assistants paired with contact centers as a service in European Portuguese. In its early stages, Accelerat.ai’s goal is to improve customer service in Portugal’s private and public sectors and speed up the country’s digital transformation. It will develop proprietary technology that can easily scale up to other EU markets since what changes after that is the data.

Accelerat.ai will work on a conversational AI framework for modern contact centers that can handle multiple languages. This will improve customer service and cut costs by automating 80 percent of customer support resolutions. It will give customers access to the latest technology in a way that doesn’t depend on the cloud provider, infrastructure, or technology. Customers will be able to choose which ASR, NLU, or TTS works best for them. The business model will be based on subscriptions that are flexible and easy to set up. This will make it possible to create 200 highly skilled AI jobs in Portugal.

Some of the applications will have a voice and video-enabled avatars that will speak to people when they call the Portuguese Healthcare system to schedule a Covid booster or call Social Security to check on the status of a maternity leave pension.

Customer service in the top European languages will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and at a lower cost. Initially designed to help the Portuguese, it will impact all EU citizens in the future because of its multi-language modularity.

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