AI-powered junk image cleaning app Siftr draws global attention

By Anusha Ashwin Artificial Intelligence is being exploited in ways that can potentially ease one’s technology-enabled life. Here is one that will perhaps help each one of us. A Noida-based start-up Siftr Labs claims to have developed an insanely powerful artificial intelligence platform, which will end all worries about organizing photos and videos. Memes, forwards, unwanted images, screenshots and all other junk images that your WhatsApp litters in your smartphone gallery can just be deleted with Siftr’s Magic Cleaning App. Siftr’s AI-powered apps analyse all photos in a jiffy and quickly separates the junk from the pictures that need to be retained.

While working at Adobe, young entrepreneur Romil Mittal along with his colleague Mayank Bhagya, noticed that with mobile cameras improving in quality, and social and messaging networks becoming popular, there was a spike in the number of pictures being clicked by every user. As a result, on an average smartphone users were storing 2,000 and more images on their device. Added to this forwarded images and videos via various messenger groups were also piling on the user’s phone memory. “The problem that most users face was that of losing memory space too fast. Both of us wanted to use our skills and understanding of AI to solve this problem, as to our knowledge there was no company in India that could delete images using Artificial Intelligence,” says Mittal elaborating on how the idea of Siftr Labs was conceived. Siftr is located in Noida, UP.

“In our conversations, we started discussing the possibility of such a product and its workings. Once we felt we were ready to dedicate ourselves full time to building such a business, we quit our jobs at Adobe and launched Siftr in 2015 to solve every image management problem of end users and professionals in the creative field,” says Mittal.

As the idea got rolling, Mittal and Bhagya inducted people within their network, who were excited to build a first-of-its-kind product and in no time they were able to attract some great talent for their startup. Bootstrapped initially, the duo set up the company with their own savings.

Launching Magic Cleaner App

“Initially, to test waters we launched AI-backed products targeted at creative professionals. Positive feedback from those users motivated us to work on a product that helps every smartphone user to have an organized image gallery and good content to share among their social media friends circle. Last year, we started working on building Magic Cleaner with an aim to help smartphone users clean their image gallery and retain only what they like,” says Mittal.

Magic Cleaner is Siftr’s recent launch in 2016. Magic Cleaner is an AI-powered app, which analyses smartphone image gallery in seconds and separates forwarded or non-personal images from personal ones. A user can clean phone memory with a single tap on the screen. “This is the first time such a cleaner has been launched for smartphones, which deletes unrequired images and videos automatically. We have been adding new features into this app to make it an image assistant and curator for smartphone users. We have introduced functions like image suggestions to accompany messages, hash tag suggestions for Instagram and image search across galleries and social media platforms frequented by the users,” explains Mittal.

“There are many cleaner apps in the market available today but none of them use AI to clean junk from smartphones. These apps just present images from users’ mobiles and ask them to manually select the images they want to delete. We believe we are ahead of the competition as our app not only cleanses the phone, frees up memory but with the features explained above, Magic Cleaner in no time has emerged as a preferred app for the users who like to click and share,” outlines Mittal.

Magic Cleaner is empowered to make image-related suggestions to users who like to send relevant images with their messages. A user in their Whatsapp window can command Magic Cleaner to find an image they want to send to a friend, for e.g. Good Morning, Happy Birthday, Happy Yoga Day etc. The app will search the users’ image gallery and social media to suggest relevant images. This helps save time and effort on users’ behalf to go online, search an image, save it and then forward it to group of friends.

Additionally, Siftr observed that Instagram has emerged as a favourite destination for users who like to click and share images. Such users use several hash tags with an image in a bid to reach a larger audience and win more followers. Magic Cleaner app plays a role here by suggesting hash tags while uploading pictures on Instagram to ensure maximum reach of the user’s post.

The app has been launched in six Indian languages – Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. “Whatsapp, the largest messenger service, is being used by people in different demographics in India from metros to tier 1 and 2 to even rural pockets. Thus, it becomes imperative for a service like ours to be available in popular Indian languages so that users can benefit from it. Keeping this in mind, we launched Magic Cleaner in six Indian languages,” says Mittal.

Siftr’s app has successfully crossed 1,50,000 downloads on Play Store and App Store. “We analyse average 20 lakh images on a daily basis and have built an archive of 7 crore images on our server. We have built deep learning infrastructure in-house, which can analyze images and find out what kind of a photo it is – personal, memes, funny, cartoon, etc., Based on this information, our product then categorizes all the photos and videos received via different messaging apps. This helps Magic Cleaner separate junk from personal pictures,” adds Mittal.

Siftr offers two more products catering to a wider user base. Apart from the Siftr Magic Cleaner that helps clear junk images, Siftr also has a Photo Organizer app that curates photos for personal use, and Siftr Website Builder is a self-updating photo website aimed at professional photographers, artists, and other creative professionals.

Drawing global attention

Interestingly, in addition to India, Siftr noticed high traffic from other countries like Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, Malaysia… validating Siftr’s idea. Mittal observed that his product was widely accepted by users from other global markets because messenger services are popular in those geographies too and the problem of image management was evidently global, making Siftr’s product popular overseas.

Early this year, Siftr raised its first round of seed funding of $1,50,000 from Mumbai-based Venture Catalysts. Unwilling to disclose more details on the funding, Mittal is confident that by next year Siftr will start generating revenues. “Magic Cleaner has generated huge response and positive reviews, which has made the company grow faster than expected. As a result of building expertise in shared media over the last few months, we would be expanding from cleaning media to a content provider,” says Mittal.