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Why Do AI Companies Outsource Data Annotation?

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Regina Panergo
Why Do AI Companies Outsource Data Annotation?

High-quality training data is crucial for a successful AI project. In order to produce high-quality data, it takes specialization and technology expertise to execute data annotation services at pixel-perfect level. 

The process of data annotation, for speech, image, video, audio, or text, is a highly specialized task that needs expertise. When we talk about high quality data, it means that the labels are both accurate and consistent. Outsourcing this task ensures that skilled annotators will dedicate their services to deliver consistent high-quality training data at a large scale. By outsourcing data annotation services, companies save time and effort freeing up their in-house data scientists to focus on areas they are experienced in instead of annotating data.

Here are a few of data annotation techniques used for specific AI initiatives.

Audio Transcription for Speech Recognition 

Audio transcription is used to train speech recognition models. In order to train these AI-based models, you need a lot of audio clips with different levels of quality in various scenarios. Converting speech to text is very labor intensive as audio can be difficult to decipher especially in different scenarios such as accents, sound quality, background noise, ambiguity, long pauses, and many others. This is why companies find it more economical and efficient to outsource audio transcription services. It is far more than simply taking the spoken word and putting it into text.

Human language is complicated and has a lot nuances such as accents, dialects, tones of voice, interjections, and mannerisms. High-accuracy audio transcription enables interactions to accurately happen between human speech and AI-based models like smart TVs, phones, virtual assistants, watches, computers, or other in-home or on-the-road technology.

Human speech must be accurately recognized to understand not only what words are being spoken but also what they mean. Voice recognition models should be able to detect relationships between words, speech impediments or foreign languages to interpret words and sentences for what they actually mean for effective communication to take place. This is why human-generated transcriptions provide a higher readability rate than any other technique.

Text Annotation for Natural Language Processing

Text annotation goes far beyond diagramming sentences and deciphering between parts of speech. Text annotation detects and labels words depending on a predetermined set of categories required by an AI company. It looks at keywords, synonyms, intent, sentiment, syntax, and a lot more. Text annotation for Natural Language Processing or NLP helps machines predict and understand the human language more easily. The end result is a user-friendly experience that is enhanced and accurate. Text annotation services involves human-annotated data to accurately classify and analyze a body of text, keywords, phrases, and the meaning behind them as well as labeling emotions, opinions, sentiment, and intent.

Image Annotation for Facial Recognition

Image annotation such as that used for facial recognition used landmark or key-point annotation techniques used to make the human faces recognizable to machines through computer vision technology. The entire face is annotated with a sequence of dots at different points to identify specific facial features. It also includes measuring the dimensions and noting other facial attributes. Aside from key-point or landmark annotation, image segmentation helps improve ML models such as self-driving cars and robots for facial recognition, motion estimation, and movement prediction. Semantic segmentation enable these machines to visualize and track moving objects accurately. 

Machine learning projects require thousands to millions of accurate and precise data to be successful. All AI initiatives need a large volume of high-quality data to train machine learning models. Most AI companies don’t have the resources to staff for massive data annotation projects. It is expensive to bring data engineers to the project and other specialists of off their core responsibilites to perform data annotation tasks.

To enable top performance of your ML model in the real world, outsourcing data annotation tasks can provide a large, on-demand annotation teams to perform these easily outsourced tasks. Since AI projects are dynamic and may require changes to the volume of data needed, outsourcing also gives companies the ability to adapt and scale up without losing data quality.

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Regina Panergo
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