An Australian artificial intelligence company has won an award through MetLife’s Asia start-up accelerator Collab.

Cre8tek secured a judges’ selection prize for its “cognitive virtual assistant platform provider” Flamingo Customer Experience.

The company will now work with MetLife Asia to trial Flamingo with one of the insurer’s local operations.

The competition attracted more than 135 applications from 34 countries. Projects covered customer engagement, sales process, operations and new business models.

MetLife picked eight finalists, which competed to win a $US100,000 ($133,200) contract to implement their solution with the insurer. The overall winner was Uniphore, a speech-recognition company founded in 2009.

During a demo-day event in Singapore, the finalists presented their business ideas to nine senior MetLife executives.

MetLife Asia President Chris Townsend says the competition attracted some of the best start-ups around.

“We believe innovation platforms such as Collab are key in identifying implementable solutions to better meet the changing needs of our customers,” he said. “The pitches from all our finalists were impressive, which made our job of selecting an overall winner very difficult. Each finalist presented something exciting and ground-breaking.”