Crowd Media secures licencing deal for talking head platform with PangeaMed

Social commerce company Crowd Media (ASX: CM8) has secured a marketing and development agreement with existing customer PangeaMed for the licence of its artificial intelligence-powered “talking head” platform.

The two-year contract will allow the South African healthcare company to offer its patients access to Crowd’s unique Q&A  talking head platform for the provision of immediate and reliable medical information before and after they receive medical treatment.

Under the terms, PangeaMed will pay Crowd a base licence fee of $32,000 to access the platform in the first year, with additional chatbots and services attracting further fees of a minimum $332,860, depending on scale and contingent upon PangeaMed’s funding.

First paying customer

In June, PangeaMed became the first paying customer for Crowd’s talking head platform.

The technology is expected to improve the quality of healthcare offered to its customer base across 50 African nations by facilitating better communication between patients and healthcare providers and across language groups in an efficient and accurate way.

Crowd chief executive officer Idan Schmorak said the agreement cements the partnership with PangeaMed and kicks-off the next step in the collaboration.

“This agreement marks an important milestone in our strategy to develop ‘voice-and-visual’ products for the next frontier of conversational commerce applications,” he said.

“PangeaMed will be integrating our technology into its own to improve medical services in South Africa and beyond – the opportunity has no boundaries.”

Continued development

In its December half-year letter to shareholders, Crowd said it was forging ahead with continued development of its talking head technology to plan and “with great clarity”.

The company’s research team has slashed the time taken to create a “digital twin” from nearly one month to four days, while technology improvements have allowed for thousands of simultaneous communications on a single server (compared to the industry standard of two communications per server).

Crowd is also working on refining the talking head appearance, and has experienced steady improvements in bringing a new level of human-likeness to the platform’s video and audio functions.

Commercialisation which began with the PangeaMed partnership is expected to continue as it expands its team with experts in machine learning and AI.

“We have the right strategy, the right people, and the right culture … our vision to create a human-like video experience, at scale, is finally within reach,” the company said.