«SmorfIA is not a starting point but rather a starting point towards the artificial intelligence of the future…Made in Naples!». It started like this Francesco SerinoCEO of TLC Nexus Benefit Companyand smiled in amusement: «Our SmorfIA is an interpreter of dreams, stories or specific episodes that reveal numbers Neapolitan grin. This is a great and fun App and it’s free, open to everyone! Then he added: «We are Neapolitans and this is our “gift” that combines culture, tradition, technology and innovation’. Made with artificial intelligence? Francesco is quick: «SmorfIA is an AI Agent, that is, an artificial intelligence agent that shows in a fun way (and also a bit of folklore) everything that an AI agent can do and all the potential and opportunities that can be obtained from it».
The route
The story of Nexus is a story with an upward trajectory: «Born as an innovative startup in 2014, today, after more than 10 years, we are an Innovative SME, based in Pozzuoli, and recently we became a Benefit Company. We always deal with the world of IoT, the internet of things – he underlines – developing innovative solutions, remote monitoring and control sensors in various fields including safety, efficiency and sustainability”. Growth over the years in both turnover and collaborators, 14 employees. A smaller team works on SmorfIA Applications with Serino, a 40-year-old telecommunications engineer; Gennaro Miccoli29 year old Senior Software Developer from Casoria; Nicola Vetton26-year-old Software Developer from Lusciano; Davide Belardi30 year old Mobile Software Developer, hailing from Apple Academy, Alessia Schettino27 year old designer from Naples.
Origin
How was SmorfIA born? “With a good friend of mine, Michele Lapiccyrellaan expert in training and learning processes – says Francesco – we follow the internal Team Building path. One day we were in the car and he told me about his dream but he didn’t know how to interpret it so we also joked about what numbers to play! From there a spark ignited and by combining all our knowledge of data analysis and artificial intelligence, along with a little madness and a lot of Neapolitan, SmorfIA was born, where the final I and A are appropriately capitalized to denote Artificial Intelligence”.
Those dreams
So how did the Neapolitan Smorfia become corrupted? Francesco smiles: “Exactly. It interprets the dream and then gives you the numbers corresponding to the Neapolitan grin. You wake up with the dream in your head and then perhaps, as happens to many people, you go and play the numbers. In addition to dreams, numbers are also played for real life episodes. In short, there is also a bit of Neapolitanism applied to our sensor: we named it “Saittelle”, which controls the water level in the manhole remotely».
Is this a little different from your innovative sensor solutions? Francesco gets serious: «This is the tip of the iceberg but it all comes from our core business which is the Internet of Things and from the fact that we work with countless data that must not only be acquired but also analyzed. Artificial intelligence plays an important role. May I add?”.
Please: «We have created various solutions, such as ProfetIA, based on artificial intelligence algorithms to make predictions for example sales/market changes, warehouse stocks or other predictions and error anomaly detection in the industrial sector». Is SmorfIA available? «Available as a web application but also as a downloadable application from the Google and Apple Stores. What this means for us is a game, something that aims to entertain, it shows that even with technology and innovation we can do simple, good things and preserve our cultural heritage.”
Market
Are you gaining any other market share with SmorfIA? «We’re giving it away for free, because for us it’s a kind of breakthrough to make us known and show what Nexus Tlc is capable of». AI has now penetrated everyday life… Francesco realized: «We don’t realize it but AI is everywhere, we use it for various solutions, such as sensors, it helps us predict many outcomes, such as whether a machine breaks down or not, whether it requires human intervention or machine downtime. We have worked in various Campanian hospital facilities and here, through PNRR, we are working on AI in the diagnostic field.”
An example? «Medication analysis, instead of going to the hospital, by taking photos, AI can tell you whether the treatment has been done well and how to intervene, or through Chatbot agents you can analyze medications and how the active ingredients interact with each other and what undesirable effects they can cause». And what are the findings of SmorfIA? «Positive, with pleasant feedback, we see people’s dreams but there is privacy, we only get dreams and return SmorfIA numbers». Is the application registered? «To Siae for the software application and the logo and trademark have been registered». After 11 years, how much turnover have you achieved? «About a million».
