The home-grown Whizzky Whisky Scanner App, which whisky bottle labels using image recognition, now has 18,000 users – of which 40% are international.

The app was born of the need for information to be delivered on-the-spot to whisky lovers, whether they are shopping for whisky or chatting to friends about a bottle and wanting to prove a fact.

It is a mobile application for both Android and iOS that enables the scanning of whisky bottle labels which are then matched against a database of images.

The tool is called Pixel Match and was developed by Evolve IT, co-owners of the app, which makes use of both Optical Character Recognition and pattern recognition.

The hybrid ensures that labels that look similar but which only vary in age statement, for example, are matched correctly.

Whizzky was soft-launched at Whisky Live Festival in Sandton in November of 2015 where a few hundred users signed up in exchange for 5 additional tasting vouchers to use at the event. From there, growth was purely organic until the next series of Whisky Live events in Cape Town in April, Durban in May and Pretoria in June of 2016 where downloads were driven through the same mechanic and promoters assisted in showing users how the app worked.

From there, growth was purely organic until the next series of Whisky Live events in Cape Town in April, Durban in May and Pretoria in June of 2016 where downloads were driven through the same mechanic and promoters assisted in showing users how the app worked.

“We’ve never done any marketing for the app at all, apart from at the Whisky Live events, and yet we get 80 new downloads per day,” says Ken Varejes, Nfinity Group CEO.

Users are consistently engaging with the app, adding whiskies to their online collections, their wishlists and their favourites, rating whiskies and writing in-depth tasting notes that are either for their own private use or which they’re making public.

They’re also using the in-app tasting note tool that guides them through what flavours to look out for. The app aggregates flavour profiles selected by users and the cumulative profiles are available under each whisky, together with the official tasting notes, history of the whisky/ distillery and other information.

The app aggregates flavour profiles selected by users and the cumulative profiles are available under each whisky, together with the official tasting notes, history of the whisky/ distillery and other information.

“Whisky Live has an incredible category-wide whisky database and the app has been developed partly to leverage and enhance the event but mostly to add value to the whisky brands who exhibit with us,” says Varejes.

“The app offers them the opportunity to learn more about their consumers and – perhaps even more importantly – to engage with them in more relevant ways based on what they learn.”

 

 

For more information and to download the app, click here.