Automatic solutions for live closed captioning @ IBC 2015
VoiceInteraction will once again have a strong presence at IBC in Amsterdam, September 11-15, 2015, showcasing its innovative solutions for Television Broadcasters and Media Content Producers at booth 14.H18.
Why Live Closed Captioning Matters
The community’s increasing awareness about the need for policies to ensure everyone equal opportunities and access to information and knowledge has led to the creation of rules imposing requirements on TV broadcasters to provide their contents in alternative ways, such as sign language and/or closed captioning. Because closed captioning proved to be useful in a broader range of circumstances — e.g. captions has been explored in language acquisition; closed captioning enables people to watch (and understand) TV programmes in noisy (shopping centers) or quiet (hospitals) public places –, broadcasters have turned attention to this alternative content description as a means to reach a wider audience. Closed captioning, though, is costly and (human) resource-intensive. Automatic tools producing high-quality results at affordable costs have, thus, been researched for years. Before fully automated approaches come into existence, solutions like re-speaking — in which an individual (re-speaker) listens to the audio track and dictates (verbatim or a summary of) the content to a speech-to-text conversion system adapted to his/her voice characteristics — was the most resource-effective captioning method.
Automatic Live Closed Captioning
VoiceInteraction – Speech Processing Technologies, S.A. pioneered the use of speaker-independent voice recognition technology in real-time, live closed-captioning of broadcast contents through AUDIMUS.MEDIA, a fully automatic closed captioning system that, in addition to transcribing the spoken utterances, segments them according to the speaker holding the turn. The system builds on the capability of VoiceInteraction‘s speech transcription technology to operate faster than real time with speaker-independent models and very large vocabularies.
What to expect from us at IBC 2015
VoiceInteraction will showcase the Fourth generation of AUDIMUS.MEDIA — building on the integration of deep-learning techniques in our speech processing technologies to optimize the performance of acoustic models derived from the ever-growing speech repositories –, and our Media Monitoring System (an integrated solution for video recording, storage and retrieval, comprising real-time tools for automatic transcription, segmentation and topic indexing of TV contents), with special emphasis on its Broadcast Edition, devoted to accommodate the specific needs of TV broadcasters and Government departments, such as the Legal Recording with loudness history graphs.
In addition to watching the demos available at our booth, our visitors will have the opportunity to gain some insight into a broader range of proven speech processing solutions, such as Speech Transcription Systems for court, medical, parliament and council proceedings, TTS and ASR Engines for IVRs and Speech Analytics in Call Centres, and Embodied Conversational Agents for multi-modal applications. We are looking forward to receiving your visit at our booth 14.H18 in Hall 14. If you wish to schedule a meeting during the event for more thorough discussions with Prof. João Neto, CEO of VoiceInteraction, please, send us a Meeting Request to the email ibc2015@voiceinteraction.tv
About IBC
IBC is a long-established annual event where more than 1,500 companies show the latest innovations and specialist technologies in electronic media and entertainment across 14 Halls. IBC will be held at the Amsterdam RAI Exhibition and Convention Centre, from 9/11 to 9/15.
About VoiceInteraction
VoiceInteraction was created in 2008 as a technological spin-off from the INESC-ID, Lisbon, providing cutting-edge speech recognition technology, such as an online speaker-independent speech transcription system that has led to the creation of fully automatic live subtitling systems for TV broadcasters and media monitoring solutions for clipping service providers, in addition to speech synthesis technology for building customized voices to accommodate the branding needs of its clients.
