【Media Coverage｜YAHOO! Finance】iKala Launches World’s First AI Image Solution “Picaas” for Google Shopping Campaigns
Picaas has proved to be approximately 400 times faster and up to 95% cheaper than a manually image editing approach
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — iKala, a Human-Centered AI marketing technology company, has announced the world’s first smart image optimization solution for Google Shopping Ads “Picaas” (Picture as a service). Powered by AI and the concept of Deep Fake, Picaas enables companies running Google shopping campaigns to do mass product feed image adjustment, eliminating non-compliant elements and enhancing product image in just 2.2 seconds. The solution is now available globally and offers a time-limited FREE tryout campaign.
Consulting firm Adthena reports retailers across the United States spend 76.4% of their advertising budget on Google Shopping Ads. iKala CEO Sega Cheng says, “Google is aggressively promoting Google Shopping Ads around the globe and providing e-commerce companies with a conversion rate that’s two to three times higher than ordinary digital ads. However, we’ve seen many companies spending extra time tackling with the strict product feed requirements. Picaas is born under the concept to automatically solve those issues and help companies to build a successful Google Shopping campaign faster, cheaper and more effective.”
The Picaas AI automatic image solution combines multiple deep-learning models. The basic principle is to use image segmentation technology to detect portions of the ad that do not meet the requirements. The software then uses image inpainting technology to complete the picture and improve its overall quality, so the rejected product picture can be successfully approved and delivered to potential customers.
Professor Bing-Yu Chen, Associate Director of the National Taiwan University IoX Center, says, “Picaas exemplifies the mission of artificial intelligence, which is to help humans take care of time and effort consuming tasks.” “Picaas was able to achieve a success rate of 70% in the early stages of its development, so its future potential of commercializing the field of AI-based computer graphics is to be anticipated.”
Picaas utilizes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to effectively process a massive number of product pictures simultaneously. This satisfies the need for e-commerce platforms to deliver product advertisements in bulk with one click of the mouse. The traditional method of manually editing Google Shopping Ads images took an average of fifteen minutes to process one picture. With Picaas, in best-case scenarios, a picture can be automatically edited in 2.2 seconds, which is four hundred times faster than humans. Currently, the minimum price per picture is around 0.1 US dollars, which is 50% to 95% cheaper than the traditional method of using human labor to edit pictures.
Picaas promotional campaign is alive now. FREE automatic optimization of three hundred Google Shopping Ads product images is open for the first twenty participants signed up on the Picaas official website from June 27th to July 11th of 2019. For more information and event details, please visit: https://picaas.io/
Product Inquiry: picaas@ikala.tv
