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By Evangelical Focus
At the end of last year, the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo hosted the so-called ExpoCristiana, a commercial event which offers concerts of Christian music, samples of evangelical publishers and even virtual simulations of episodes of the Bible.
One of the most striking products was the one offered by the artificial intelligence company Kuzzma under the slogan “Change the way you manage your church”. The company presented a facial recognition service especially aimed at churches.
On the first day of ExpoCristiana, Marcelo Scharan, executive director of Kuzzma, gave a conference entitled Personalization, data and churches.
“Data such as gender, age, attendance, arrival time, likely reasons for being late, and many others are analyzed and presented in reports. We can even define if someone needs a pastoral visit”, Scharan said.
According to the Kuzzma website, facial recognition works from a high-resolution panoramic camera installed in the churches, that identifies both personal data and the attendance to the worship service.
Then, with all that data, they make reports of each person, which include statistics on their behavior and even warnings if there is any abnormal activity.
The Brazilian company Igreja Mobile was also selling the facial recognition service at the fair.
“Today, who doesn’t want control of their environment? Who comes in and who goes out? We found out that the churches really wanted to know about it and that’s why we brought this technology”, Luís Henrique Sabatine, development director of Igreja Mobile, pointed out.
The price of the service varies according to the number of events in which it is used and the number of cameras, starting with a monthly fee of $200 for one event per week, with one camera installed.
A camera captures images and sends them to a computer capable of recognizing people’s faces and other data.
“We are able to tell the client the number of people, their frequency of attendance, their mood, if they are happy, sad, distressed, or scared”, explained Sabatine.
Igreja Mobile also offers reports about all those data, in adittion to gender and average age of the people who attend the service.
The Restart Project Evangelical Church in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the clients of Igreja Mobile. Its pastor, Cláudio Duarte, appears in a video promoting the company in social media.
“Igreja Mobile is a product that will let your message get to places you would never imagine”, he said.
Restart Project Church uses this AI technology since the beginning of 2019, being one of the first clients. “We use facial recognition to provide extra assistance to members who are not coming to services”, underlined Caio Duarte, the church’s IT officer.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by Evangelical Focus under a Creative Commons license.
Faithfully Magazine is a news and culture publication centered on Christian communities of color.
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