PRESS RELEASE
Revolutionizing Age Verification: NVISO Japan and Privately SA Join Forces for Cutting-Edge AI Technology in Digital Kiosks
7th February, 2023
NVISO Japan and Privately SA join forces to bring advanced age verification technology to digital kiosks. The solution offers secure, safe and engaging experiences while maintaining privacy and enhancing interactivity for digital kiosks and interactive avatars.
Yokohama, Japan – 7th February 2023
NVISO Japan KK, a subsidiary of the leading Human Behavioural Analytics AI company NVISO SA, has signed a binding Heads of Agreement with Privately SA, a provider of age verification solutions.
The partnership aims to revolutionize the digital kiosk industry by combining NVISO's advanced AI technology and Privately's privacy-by-design age verification technology. The result will be secure and engaging experiences for customers while offering businesses a way to comply with age restrictions while maintaining privacy. This innovative technology, which combines ease of use and efficiency, will provide peace of mind for both businesses and customers.
Digital kiosks equipped with this innovative technology will use cameras and microphones to verify a customer’s age quickly and accurately while offering unprecedented data protection and privacy to users. These systems will utilize advanced facial analysis algorithms and voice analysis to determine the age of the customer by making kiosk cameras and microphones ‘age-aware’.
This applies a quick, discreet process and does not require any personal information to be collected or stored in central servers.
This technology is particularly useful for industries of restricted retail, where strict age verification laws are in place. Digital kiosks equipped with this technology will be better able to ensure that only customers who meet the age requirement are able/allowed to purchase restricted products, reducing the risk of underage sales and countering the growing problem of stolen or borrowed ID cards.
The HOA will provide NVISO with access to Privately’s software development kit (SDK) for the purpose of building integrations into NVISO’s holistic platform that features predictive analytics tied to emotional and transactional outcomes. These integrations will be designed to work along with interactive digital avatars that are able to understand various behavioral and emotional facets of their interactors through eye tracking and facial detection. Combining these integrations with NVISO's Human Behaviour AI will enhance the customer experience by providing personalized and engaging interactions. Further, the technology can track and analyze customer behavior, which will enable businesses to offer bespoke interactions through recommendations and promotions.
Privately’s product suite will provide Age Verification to the NVISO platform with:
- Full preservation of privacy as it operates completely “on-device” with “Zero-data” implementation.
- Multimodal support– can use face, voice or both and includes anti-spoofing and liveness.
- Continuous Improvement using federated learning techniques that can be deployed to continuously improve system accuracy across age/gender/race.
- Independent certification and regulatory approvals both in the UK (UKAS) and in Germany (KJM), with UK GDPR certification expected shortly. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has also audited Privately’s age assurance service and calls it a ‘Zero-Data’ implementation.
Privately CEO, Deepak Tewari commented: “Privately is excited to be partnering with NVISO on this collaboration which will initially target the Japanese retail market. In Japan the use of automation in computer-to-human interactions using digital characters is well established and NVISO’s presence and expertise in Japan brings significant added value in terms of it being able to address the market for deployment of digital avatars for customer interactions.”
“Deploying Privately’s privacy-preserving age verification technology with digital avatars humanised with behavioral detection brings powerful AI-based automation into digital kiosks enabling a complete range of retail transactions from customised age-appropriate interaction with customers to those needing the ability to facilitate or restrict access to restricted goods and services. Of course, the applicability of similar age-verified transactions extends to many other sectors beyond retail.”
NVISO delivers solutions for a wide range of use cases including those in the areas of Smart Living, Smart Mobility, and Smart Health. This is achieved through a range of AI Apps providing visual observation, perception and semantic reasoning capabilities, in supporting autonomous “human-like” interactions. NVISO is already working with partners to demonstrate and then deliver an Interactive Digital Avatar and to promote and sell this solution in the Japanese market targeting products such as digital kiosks.
NVISO AI Apps are specifically designed for resource-constrained low-power and low-memory hardware platforms deployed at the extreme edge. These AI Apps analyze core signals of human behavior, such as body movements, facial expressions, emotions, identity, head pose, gaze, eye state, gestures, or activities, and identify objects with which users interact. In addition, these AI Apps can be optimized for typically resource-constrained, low-power and low-cost processing platforms deployed on the edge, as demonstrated with ultra-compact models such as the Emotion Recognition AI App with less than 100KB of memory. Furthermore,
NVISO AI Apps can be easily configured to suit specific camera systems for optimal performance in terms of distance and camera angle, and thanks to NVISO’s large-scale proprietary human behavior databases, NVISO’s AI Apps are robust to the imaging conditions often found in real-world deployments. Unlike cloud-based solutions, NVISO’s solutions do not require information to be sent off-device for processing elsewhere, so user privacy and safety can be protected.
“Increasing efforts by customer-centric firms to provide emotionally engaging experiences to customers is a key factor driving adoption of digital human avatars globally in systems such as Digital Kiosks,” said Colin Mason, Country Manager of NVISO Japan K.K. “There is strong demand to provide enhanced Age Verification during automated transaction processes for those products and services where age restrictions apply in order to protect vulnerable users, while at the same time providing strict privacy protection to all users.”