Brands spend a huge amount of resources and money to ensure that their content resonates with users, especially at an emotional level. They often collect feedback from their users through emails, surveys and focus groups.

Today, every brand wants to build something which is truly consumer-centric. However, connecting with users at an emotional level is not easy. This is where Entropik comes in. Founded in 2016, the startup enables research, marketing, and product teams to conduct quantitative and qualitative research in-house using AI.

“We have built mechanisms to understand consumer behaviour using facial coding, eye tracking and voice AI. Historically, surveys have dominated the mechanism and we are sort of replacing them with an emotion AI-powered behavioural insights platform,” Ranjan Kumar, Founder and CEO, Entropik, told AIM.

“What I realised is that all businesses are founded on the interaction between businesses and customers, where the customer at the core is highly emotional by nature. Therefore, anything built around the subconscious emotional and behavioural understanding of humans is bound to be impactful,” Kumar said.

Emotion AI

Through Entropik’s technology, brands can monitor the emotional response of their audience while they view a television advertisement or read about the brand. The technology tracks the user’s facial expression, eye movement and provides second by second insight about the user’s tension level, engagement level and emotional level.

Its technology stack consist of:

• Facial coding: AI that uses webcam/mobile camera feed to analyse facial expressions to know attention, engagement, and emotions.

• Eye Tracking: AI that uses webcam/mobile camera feed to analyse eye movement and thus generates a heat map of where exactly the user is looking on the screen. 

• Voice AI: Transcription and Tonality analyses of Voice feed from any conversation.

“Entropik’s AI-powered Integrated Market Research Platform covers Quant, Qual, Behavior Analytics (using patented Facial Coding, Eye Tracking, and Voice AI technologies), Video Interviews and Self Captures with an integrated panel under one umbrella,” Kumar said.

On Generative AI

Besides tracking emotions, Entropik also has a tool called ‘Decode’, which is a conversation intelligence platform that helps businesses analyse customer conversations to gain valuable insights. To do so, Entropik is leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM).

“We are currently testing how LLMs can be integrated within Decode through APIs to extract insights from conversations between brands and consumers. The initial results of the prototype have been encouraging, and we are now exploring ways to scale it up.”

Entropik wants to build the world’s largest emotion repository database and use it to make it a lot more prescriptive and predictive. “What we want to do is feed the chatbot with this data and see if it can become a search engine for the end buyer”.

“In addition to that, we also plan to create localised models trained in regional languages and dialects to expand the reach of the platform in the future.”

Demand for the technology

Currently, Entropik caters to over 150 clients across sectors such as Telecom, BFSI, Media, CPG, FMCG, and Entertainment, among others with a presence in the US, Canada and Europe. In the last 18 months, the startup has grown 7X in terms of revenue and plans to take its products to the US and European markets as well.

“Our products offer a unique proposition to leading brands such as ITC, TATA, and Godrej, enabling them to conduct comprehensive testing of their creatives and campaigns,” Kumar said.

“The insights garnered through our platforms can result in up to a 30% lift in marketing spends for brands. Furthermore, we offer benchmarking services that allow brands to gauge their performance against their competitors, providing invaluable insights into their relative standing in the industry,” he concluded.

Preventing misuse of the technology

Although it is fascinating to witness the application of AI for tracking a user’s emotions, the potential for misuse is a concern. There have been concerns raised about the use of similar technologies for surveillance purposes.

In this regard, Kumar emphasised that the technology is implemented only after obtaining the users’ consent. Moreover, it is exclusively applied to those users who voluntarily participate in the focus groups of specific brands.

“What we do is that we test it out in the sample audience of 50–100 consumers who are very well aware and have given consent and are willing to participate in the research,” Kumar explained. Further, Entropik has also taken a lot of precautionary measures, for instance, they do not store any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) details. 

“We also don’t record any video at our end. What we do is we analyse everything on the fly while the session is going on. What comes in my system is just the derivative data,” Kumar continued, “What we are truly interested in is not in individual data but the collective intelligence and collective trend of behaviour is what we are trying to analyse.”

The post This Company now Decodes Emotions to Understand Consumer Behaviour appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.