Public Funding for The Workcast Corporation Limited

At the heart of this innovation is the goal to facilitate those who struggle to articulate their ideas and knowledge in pressurised situations to large audiences. This innovation will provide an easy way for anyone, anywhere to produce panel discussions in webinars and other digital events rather than traditional slide-based presentations. Currently, there is no automated way of achieving quality panel discussions, and only cost prohibitive human-led facilitation exists. Our innovation provides an AI facilitator that will enhance a discussion and get the best from panelists, whilst adapting to keep the discourse focused on the intended subject areas. An emerging trend in business and academia is that of panel discussions led by slick moderation. Panelists are not expected to produce detailed presentations but instead, simply answer and discuss questions within their sphere of knowledge. Our innovation vastly reduces the time, cost, and skill level in creating panel discussions in webinars and digital events. Our technology deploys techniques regularly used by interviewers and facilitators who despite potentially limited understanding of the discussion subject, need to research, use journalistic skills; respond, and use strategic timing of questions to produce the best interview performance. The AI will be trained through "machine learning" and will initially be integrated into WorkCast's existing online studio; where content is presented live and recorded. The far larger commercial opportunity will be as a stand alone solution that can be incorporated into more mainstream webinar solutions like Teams, Hangouts, and Zoom. In these scenarios, the virtual 'facilitator' will join the event in the same way as existing recording solutions do today.

Large scale online virtual events and webinars have become a critical aspect of presenting and communication information to large audiences, with explosive growth in demand driven by the Covid pandemic. Such events comprise a constantly varying mix of information streams from presenter webcams, video streams, presentation slides and panel discussions, as well as various attendee interactions and activities. Behind the scenes event production by trained production engineers ensures all attendees receive an interface layout that allows the to make sense of what is going on at any given time. This project seeks to automate the vision mixing process using artificial intelligence to quickly and accurately select the most appropriate layout mix live, removing the need for a human production crew for every virtual event (which is a huge growth barrier) and reducing the cost of service to our customers.

With the restrictions on movement in place around the world as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people, social groups and large organisations are turning to web-based communication to facilitate remote working and interaction. Despite the large number of providers of communications platforms for individual and groups, there are very few providers of environments that can host hundreds of delegates. WorkCast are UK-based providers of market leading virtual event software. Our Virtual Events platform is used by large organisations around the world to host webinars, conferences and educational events. We are now experience a surge in demand that requires us to innovate and adapt our product offering to meet customer requirements. This project will focus on automating the set-up process of events in on our platform, reducing the amount of intervention and support required by WorkCast staff and significantly increasing our capacity to host multiple concurrent events. Alongside this, we will be developing new features that will make our Virtual Events platform a unique online replacement for large conferences. These new features include development of: * Webcam-based breakout rooms where small groups can move away from the main proceedings for smaller interactive discussions * Enhanced AI Introductions that will make smart suggestions of delegates you may be interested in connecting with based on delegate profiles and behaviours and interactions with event content, making it easier to find people that matter to you in events with large numbers of attendees. * Accessibility functionality to improve the experience for users with hearing, sight or learning difficulties. The project will form the basis of a new product offering for WorkCast, facilitating large scale communication and education during this time of uncertainty and provide a platform for large international events and conference to go ahead despite travel restrictions. An Extension for Impact change request to this project extends the work with additional funding to include full quality testing of a complete software release and subsequent testing with select customers. This also includes work to prepare for full rollout and engagement with potential customers to sign up the functionality for events throughout 2021. This extension ensures that this project can be rapidly exploited and lead to the financial, social and environmental benefits described in the original application.

WorkCast are a leading provider of online hosted events such as webinars and webcasts. We are steadily growing our market share in the UK and US and have recognised an opportunity to introduce a novel feature to the market that will expand the value of content produced for webinars by allowing users to automatically create multiple shorter edits for use on social media and other marketing platforms. We will develop an innovative AI Editor for webinar content that allows users to create edit scenarios based on specific content sub-themes. A series of potential short clips based on the selections will then be automatically compiled from the webinar content and presented to the user, allowing them to save and export as required.