Does your TV station suffer from closed-captioning corruption? We’ve all seen it — that embarrassing machine-led substitution of the wrong word for what is actually spoken during any live telecast.
What if there was a tool that could help broadcasters in possibly never getting names wrong again in subtitles? A British firm thinks it has the answer, and it will demonstrate its technology at the 2018 NAB Show in Las Vegas from April 8-12.
A new Custom Dictionary from Cambridge, England-based Speechmatics is designed to allow TV stations to quickly add context specific words to Speechmatics’ dictionary simply via text.
Surely, this could mean Shirley’s name could appear correctly.
“Live broadcast subtitling has a recognized problem when it comes to names and place names,” the company notes.
With Custom Dictionary, a news story involving Miami restaurant El Palacio de los Jugos wouldn’t appear with odd words in English, or perhaps translated to “Juice Palace.”
Furthermore, a Los Angeles Kings sports report would avoid talking about a “dust in brown” hat trick and instead refer to star player Dustin Brown.
“Traditionally, transcription providers would have to train each specific model for a customer to include special words,” Speechmatics notes. “However, setting up a new model has typically been very time-consuming, usually requiring an overnight rebuild. Custom Dictionary streamlines the entire process by putting the customer in control and allowing them to add new words in plain text to ‘teach’ the model, regardless of use case or language context.”
This could also aid stations seeking to monetize brand mentions in live programming, through such AI platforms as Veritone Inc.‘s aiWARE.
The Custom Dictionary enables users to define the context of a conversation in advance and input those difficult terms into the dictionary, so that when they do come up they are transcribed without error.
Speechmatics CEO Benedikt von Thüngen commented, “Accuracy is still the key metric for speech recognition systems and it has remained top of mind throughout the development of our solutions. Understanding what has been said is key and everyone speaks using different acronyms and terminology that is bespoke to them. We now offer the first step towards personalized transcription.”
Want to demo Speechmatics’ Custom Dictionary at the 2018 NAB Show? Stop by booth SU7813.
