Mappo

The Need

Automobile manufacturers worldwide are in the midst of searching for new revenue streams. The decline in profits from electric vehicle sales and increased competition from Chinese and Korean manufacturers are putting significant pressure on automakers. This has led them to identify in-car software as a key future revenue source. Most manufacturers are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in developing solutions aimed at generating income from activities within the vehicle. For example, STELLANTIS (Peugeot, Fiat, Lancia, Citroën, etc.) has set a goal for 2030 in which 30% of its revenue will come from in-car services.

Another issue that needs addressing is the driving experience itself. Sabrina Yuan, Chief Strategy Officer of the Volkswagen Group, summarized the shared position of herself, the Chief Research Officer of Mercedes, and a senior executive at STELLANTIS in late June 2024: "Gaming and entertainment will play a central role in the driving experience of the future. We must offer a variety of applications to provide continuous value to our customers."

A further challenge arising from the statements and investments of automakers is how to utilize the free time of users in autonomous vehicles. Autonomous driving frees up significant attention and time that would otherwise be spent on driving, and the rapid technological advancements in this area create a new need: providing value to users' free time. Over the past three years, MAPPO has identified a growing demand from all automakers, without exception, to incorporate entertainment content into vehicle services. Automakers have signed agreements to integrate leading brands such as YouTube, TikTok, Disney, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, and Booking, among others, to offer a rich and diverse entertainment experience for vehicle users.

The Solution

Over the past few years, MAPPO has been refining and perfecting its solutions to address the following key challenges:

1. Creating New Revenue Streams
2. Enhancing the Travel Experience
3. Maximizing Free Time in Vehicles

How does MAPPO effectively tackle these three challenges?

1. Creating New Revenue Streams: Automakers can monetize various software applications, primarily focused on entertainment, through diverse business models. MAPPO is a key player in this space, contributing to increased revenue for both automakers and software providers. All business models are built on revenue-sharing agreements.
2. Enhancing the Travel Experience: MAPPO enriches the travel experience by offering podcasts relevant to the journey, songs tied to specific locations, historical insights, information on sports or culinary traditions in the areas being traveled, as well as quizzes and trivia related to the precise locations the vehicle is passing through.
3. Maximizing Free Time in Vehicles: MAPPO’s content was rigorously tested by Volkswagen (VW) in user trials, where it received impressive ratings, with an overall satisfaction score of 6.6 out of 7. Additionally, MAPPO plans to extend its offerings with a mobile app, enabling users to continue accessing content outside of the vehicle. This ensures that the experience can continue both before entering the vehicle and after leaving it, as requested by most automakers.

The Technology

The company has developed the STORY CREATION MACHINE, a powerful AI engine capable of automatically generating content at a world-class level. The company believes there is no need to create new content but rather to leverage the wealth of material that has already been written, composed, and created throughout human history. Over three years, the company refined and tailored the engine to meet user needs. Today, the STORY CREATION MACHINE can generate content for a large city within a few hours. To date, the company has created 250,000 stories across 60,000 locations (POIs) in the U.S., Korea, Israel, and Europe. A POI is a specific location, such as a street, site, or address, and the stories include the history of the location, video clips, excerpts from books, trivia games, puzzles, interesting facts, information on cuisine, sports, and music.

The advanced capabilities of the engine and the speed of content generation enrich the travel experience, providing users with a wide range of content and adding relevant context to their journey. All content is delivered to users in audio format.

The company is currently developing several new features, such as real-time content creation, personalized content delivery based on user preferences, geographical location, news events, weather, and more. The concept of location-based content creation is not new, but all previous attempts relied on manual work that was costly and limited in scope. MAPPO has cracked this challenge with the help of a top-tier software team.

The search for Points of Interest (POI) is a key step in the content creation process of the SCM (Story Creation Machine). This process is the first stage in the production chain and is carried out before any additional content creation tasks. The search for POIs is conducted in the following steps:

1. Link Analysis: The SCM begins by analyzing all the links found on the Wikipedia page of the desired location. Each link is considered a potential POI candidate, which will be evaluated in the subsequent stages of the process.
2. Candidate Evaluation: To determine whether a candidate is indeed a POI relevant to the desired location, the SCM uses an algorithm that relies on various data sources, such as coordinates, WikiData, and OpenStreetMap. This process helps filter out irrelevant candidates and ensures that only genuine monuments/POIs are included in the final content.

Content Creation

The content creation process within MAPPO's SCM system leverages advanced language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, to generate precise and high-quality content for users. The development team has invested significant efforts in ensuring the content's quality and accuracy, making sure it is not only engaging but also reliable and precise.

To achieve this, the company employs several strategies:

1. Guideline Management: The team meticulously maintains a library of guidelines used to generate content from the large language models. These guidelines are carefully managed and regularly updated to ensure they produce high-quality, relevant, and consistent responses from the language models.
2. ELO Rating System: To evaluate and enhance the content creation process, the company uses an ELO rating system combined with human feedback. This system helps identify areas for improvement and ensures that only the most successful methods are used for content generation.
3. Reducing Hallucinations: One of the challenges with large language models is their tendency to generate content that may be inaccurate or irrelevant. To address this issue, MAPPO implements a combination of general rules, post-generation processing techniques, and manual review processes to filter out potentially incorrect information and ensure high content validity.

By utilizing advanced language models like GPT-4 and applying stringent quality control measures, MAPPO's SCM system is capable of producing informative, engaging, and reliable content for users worldwide.

Mappo for Automotive

Mappo’s solution for the automotive industry provides engaging and popular cultural content for drivers and passengers, based on geographic location and personal preferences learned from previously displayed and selected content.

Key Product Components:

1. Mappo App for Android Automotive: This app maps the route and uses voice and audio to deliver content tailored to the user’s future location.
2. Advanced Content Selection Algorithm: This algorithm selects the most suitable content for drivers and passengers from thousands of options, considering personal preferences.
3. AWS OpenSearch: This platform enables rapid access to location-based content, ensuring a seamless and personalized user experience.
4. Content Management System (CMS): A web-based application designed for creating and editing content, allowing users to enrich their travel experience with high-quality and interesting material.
5. Story Creation Module (SCM): A central engine based on AI algorithms that automatically generates location-based cultural content, providing users with unique cultural experiences tailored to their location.

Automotive Product

Mappo’s flagship product for the automotive industry is an application for Google’s dedicated in-car operating system, Android Automotive. It uses an algorithm to select engaging audio content in real-time based on location, preferences, and user history. Integration with AWS OpenSearch allows quick access to location-based content.