Don’t worry, they’re not building robots to take over the world. But what Built.io is doing, alongside Taskware, is certainly interesting. Built.io is a vendor in the integration platform space. Essentially their reason for being is to connect anything, with anything. Any tool or service that has an API is a contender to connect into the company’s mobile development platform.

For its part, Taskware is one of a growing number of platforms that offers human beings to perform particular tasks. As part of the “gig economy,” Taskware has a vast number of human beings, ready to take on jobs. In particular, it’s angle is around speech and image recognition and related services, things like data entry and collection, audio transcription, categorization, metadata tagging, and machine learning training. It should be noted that, in a reflection on some societal concerns about the impacts of this contract-based work on individuals, one of Taskware’s differentiations is that its workers are actually full-time employees

Anyway, given that Taskware has its own API, and embraces the idea of developers integrating their own service into their tools, it would seem obvious that it was a good candidate to be integrated into the Built.io platform.

And so it is with the announcement of this partnership that seeks to reduce human tasks to a simple API call within individual applications. The integration means that Taskware’s services are available across around 200 individual application, such as Salesforce, Asana and Box. The use case is obvious – users can automatically have audio files that are, for example, dropped into a particular Box folder, transcribed and categorized.

By connecting to Taskware’s API, Built.io Flow triggers a task for a human to complete after machine-driven tasks are executed, which prompts Taskware taskers to respond back programmatically with the finished task. And if you’re not confused after that complex chain of processes, you’re a very smart individual. Suffice it to say, Built.io Flow makes it easy for customers to automate tedious actions, which is why an integration with Taskware was a natural fit.

Customers leveraging Built.io’s workflows can use the Taskware API calls to automate a variety of tasks, including:

  1. Transcribing audio files and video files for closed captioning or search tagging by dropping the file into a shared online cloud storage folder
  2. Triggering a follow-up lead qualification phone call from a marketing form, with respondent data entered into a CRM system of choice
  3. Translation of websites and blog entries to preferred languages and republishing the text triggered by publishing to the site or blog
  4. Embedding Taskware into existing collaboration workflows to track work progress through messaging and task management applications

MyPOV

I like that this is a combination of human-based and machine-based processes and, as such, it automates and augments the benefits that each approach brings. Having to take advantage of these sort of human-based services fairly frequently, the idea of doing it via an application certainly appeals.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • I wanted to share my experience with selecting a mobile backend for my app. I used to run my applications (I have several in the app store(s)) on Parse and was pretty happy with the backend until Facebook decided to shut down the service. After that I have evaluated all listed options and was not happy with any of them for various reasons. Firebase was not a good fit because the of their approach with JSON document being a database – I did a stress test with million nodes in the tree and the service was not performing well. AWS is quite complex and becomes expensive very quickly while Azure and built.io are quite limited in the capabilities. Kinvey is both limited and super expensive once you start doing something more serious in the app. In the end I chose Backendless (https://backendless.com) for my backend. The service has native SDKs for all major mobile and web platforms. The usability and developer experience is by far the best I have seen. The service has an extremely flexible server-side code model where I can deploy Java and JS server-side code to override default handling of the API and to create my own API services. My apps leverage social (Facebook, Twitter, Google) login, geolocation, file upload/download, push notifications (iOS, Android) and of course data persistence, which has really awesome support for complex relations. Check it out if you are looking for a flexible and very reasonably priced backend.

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