Meet 'Mrs Cray' at Cannes - digital embodiment of successful board game

17 Jun 2016

Mrs Cray, the digital inspiration assistant for the creative community, is to be revealed at Cannes Lions by Pl-atform. The new automated tool aims to inspire creatives during brainstorms, expanding people's thinking by making it easier for them to come up with ideas.

It will be showcased at the Lions Innovation’s start up village on Tuesday 21 June. The concept started out less than two years ago as a board game when Pl-atform was asked to devise a way to train junior staff at other agencies to make them more creative. The board game helped originate marketing ideas that brands invested $2m in and Mrs Cray is the digital embodiment of the highly successful game.

Meet 'Mrs Cray' at Cannes - digital embodiment of successful board game

Mrs Cray uses unprecedented algorithmic data management and visualisation to revolutionise the way in which the creative community can discover images, words, places, objects, technologies and emotions when exploring creative briefs. The tool uses speech recognition, instantly processing and understanding the needs of its users through several artificially intelligent methods. Mrs Cray will then crawl the internet’s greatest APIs to seek out data in galleries, books, social media, museums to deliver a single board of inspiration. The inspiration assistant’s in-built learning processes mean that Mrs Cray will evolve and learn over time, always improving to meet the needs of the creative community.

Founder, Ravi Ruparel comments, “We aren’t aiming to replace anything or anyone in the industry, just assist it with new tools. Mrs Cray’s combination of speech recognition, natural language processing, APIs and machine learning algorithms simply display images with links to assist during the creative process. It is quite incredible that in 99% of brainstorms in meeting rooms that the most advanced piece of technology is a coloured pen. There aren’t many sites that you can literally just talk to!”

Creative assistant, Sophie Finch adds, “The tool allows your brain to do less unnecessary thinking and more creative thinking. Concerning neuroscience, the easier you can make it to focus on the connections, as opposed to working out what should be on the board, the better the idea you will come up with. Having some creative assistance should lead to a better idea.”

At Cannes, a visit to Mrs Cray could inspire creatives in less than five minutes to make 2016 insanely powerful for their brands. In addition to a web-accessed service, the team has developed a prototype Mrs Cray box that will connect directly to your meeting room screen and display ever changing content to provide inspiration based on the conversations taking place.