Objectives

Since 2016, Bigo Live – a live-streaming app, providing real-time user-generated content – has aimed to unite global communities. Targeting a Gen-Z and Millennial audience and with users in >150 countries, users can share life moments and showcase talents. Fans show support by sending real-time, virtual gifts, which can be converted into real money, allowing broadcasters to earn an income through content production – providing much-needed economic support during a pandemic. 
Integrated into the app is a sophisticated Content Management System, powered by AI.

The purpose of the AI CMS is to ensure that users, both content creators and viewers alike will not be subjected to questionable and offensive content in video, audio and visual. Including but not limited to violence, sexual insinuation, hate speech, and other potentially offensive material. 

Other than curating the content, the AI powers a highly engaging and interactive feature that allows users to animate and bring to life their broadcasts. This is achieved through stickers, magic effects, and other fun elements that can be activated both by the viewer and content creator via the platform. 

Strategy and Execution

BIGO's strategy is to use the founding AI system to facilitate the transmission of content in a safe and family-friendly environment. This is achieved with a strong team of AI scientists and engineers whom we hire from all around the world. 

In order to facilitate the flow of talent, BIGO's Technical Team are able to:

• Travel to any of our offices (over 30) around the world to experience local culture, and to help our AI team develop a system that is relevant to our users. 
• Coach and build teams within their scope of work with the purpose of transferring knowledge 
• Support local universities to groom the next generation of AI talents. This has been done with local scholarships in Singapore and China with on-going discussions with universities in the Middle East. 
• Partnerships with like-minded companies to strengthen the AI industry so that there is knowledge sharing. 
• Agility to scope the AI system to the unique characteristics of a country. e.g. Indonesia's government, KOMINFO has partnered with BIGO to create a unique system to help them curate undesirable content on the internet. This has resulted in over 200,000 violations that have been prevented as of Feb 2019. 

In addition to our AI system, BIGO has also committed to investing over $100m into key regions to help uplift the standard of digitisation and close the gap for these regions in the area of AI and technology. 

Results

This technology provides users with a safe, trusted online platform environment, by:

• Automatically reviewing over 300million data pockets (images, videos, text) – detecting undesirable feeds (e.g. gambling) with 99.5% accuracy and removing within 60 seconds.
• Processing >300million images, human-input review >1million images, and >60,000 pieces of negative content daily.
• Housing >200,000 undesirable keywords in our negative keyword library; AI automatically detects, issuing penalties to offenders.
• Facial recognition detection also alerts administrators of possible underage content creators and will issue a warning or account ban. 

Bigo Live is proud to be: 

• A top-five grossing social app (Google Play/Apple Apps) in countries including America, Thailand, and Indonesia (March-2020).
• #6 in a 2020 Apptopia/Braze.com live-streaming report, outranking Disney+ and Twitch, for global downloads.
• Winner of 2020 IT Awards "Hot Tech Company of the Year - Artificial Intelligence", Stevie's "Best User Experience" for 2020, BMA's "Best Social Media App" for 2020, Singapore Business Review 2020 "Technology Award" 

Media