Sumathi Awards by the Sumathi Group of Company is an annual award bestowed to distinguished individuals involved in Sri Lanka's television screen. Introduced in 1995, the Sumathi ceremony is one of the most popular television program events in Sri Lanka. Three of the award categories are based on popular votes from people where they can vote for the most popular teledrama, actor, and actress via SMS, mobile app, and newspaper coupon votes.

Even though they had utilized the SMS voting system earlier, they had had the challenge of counting SMS votes real time and updating the results on the leaderboard. Moreover, last year (2018) they had introduced mobile app votes where people can send votes through both SMS and the mobile app and show the real time count on the mobile app leaderboard. However, Sumathi Awards wanted to give a seamless experience to the audience by providing a real-time leaderboard on the Sumathi mobile application with votes accumulated from SMS, mobile app, and newspaper coupons.

We provided a shortcode solution to receive the SMS votes for the three award categories and to send the vote count to the mobile app votes. The shortcode was available on all the operators with charging enabled for each SMS message. The ShoutOUT incoming SMS solution was powered by an AI solution where the SMS content was identified intelligently and allocated for the right contestant. Eg: Vote for Thumindu - the possibility of people sending SMS with different types of content like the contestant number or the contestant name spelt in different ways like Thumindu, Thumidu, etc. Further, ShoutOUT built a highly scalable platform which handled 100 SMS votes per second in the last hour of the voting campaign and it helped to run the system without any interruptions.