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Imagine buying a dress online because a piece of code sold you on its ‘flattering, feminine flair’. Or convinced you ‘romantic floral details’ would outline your figure with ‘timeless style’. The very same day your friend buys the same dress from the same website but she’s sold on a description of ‘vibrant tones’, ‘fresh cotton feel’ and ‘statement sleeves’.

This is not a detail from a sci-fi short story but the reality and big picture vision of Hypotenuse AI , a YC-backed startup that’s using computer vision and machine learning to automate product descriptions for e-commerce.

One of the two product descriptions shown below is written by a human copywriter. The other flowed from the virtual pen of the startup’s AI, per an example on its website.

Can you guess which is which?
* And if you think you can — well, does it matter?

Imagine buying a dress online because a piece of code sold you on its ‘flattering, feminine flair’. Or convinced you ‘romantic floral details’ would outline your figure with ‘timeless style’. The very same day your friend buys the same dress from the same website but she’s sold on a description of ‘vibrant tones’, ‘fresh cotton feel’ and ‘statement sleeves’.

This is not a detail from a sci-fi short story but the reality and big picture vision of Hypotenuse AI , a YC-backed startup that’s using computer vision and machine learning to automate product descriptions for e-commerce.

One of the two product descriptions shown below is written by a human copywriter. The other flowed from the virtual pen of the startup’s AI, per an example on its website.

Can you guess which is which?
* And if you think you can — well, does it matter?

Screen grab:
Hypotenuse AI’s website

Discussing his startup on the phone from Singapore, Hypotenuse AI’s founder Joshua Wong tells us he came up with the idea to use AI to automate copywriting after helping a friend set up a website selling vegan soap.

“It took forever to write effective copy. We were extremely frustrated with the process when all we wanted to do was to sell products,” he explains. “But we knew how much description and copy affect conversions and SEO so we couldn’t abandon it.”

Wong had been working for Amazon, as an applied machine learning scientist for its Alexa AI assistant. So he had the technical smarts to tackle the problem himself. “I decided to use my background in machine learning to kind of automate this process. And I wanted to make sure I could help other e-commerce stores do the same as well,” he says, going on to leave his job at Amazon in June to go full time on Hypotenuse.

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The core tech here — computer vision and natural language generation — is extremely cutting edge, per Wong.

“What the technology looks like in the back end is that a lot of it is proprietary,” he says. “We use computer vision to understand product images really well. And we use this together with any metadata that the product already has to generate a very ‘human fluent’ type of description. We can do this really quickly — we can generate thousands of them within seconds.”

“A lot of the work went into making sure we had machine learning models or neural network models that could speak very fluently in a very human-like manner. For that we have models that have kind of learnt how to understand and to write English really, really well. They’ve been trained on the Internet and all over the web so they understand language very well.

“Then we combine that together with our vision models so that we can generate very fluent description,” he adds.

Image credit:
Hypotenuse

Wong says the startup is building…