Broadcast Bionics is building the future of radio – integrating transcription technology from Speechmatics

In the 20th Century, radio was a significant means of communication because of its ability to reach large numbers of people quickly and easily. It was the most common way for political and national leaders to address nations and countries across the world. However, radio had its drawbacks. Listeners were only able to tune in at the times dictated by the broadcasters, due to limitations of technological advancements.

With the introduction and success of television broadcasting in the1950s, the radio broadcast industry saw a decline in listeners.

The 21st Century has seen the radio industry evolve through new technologies to compete with the success of broadcast television—primarily through an increased demand for easily discoverable and more accessible content. Broadcast Bionics is a leading provider in software development and hardware distribution for global radio broadcasting businesses, delivering exceptional industry standard for audience engagement and communication solutions.

Through Speechmatics’ automatic speech recognition technology, Broadcast Bionics can deliver solutions that make multimedia content searchable and discoverable. By creating a Multi-Object Recorder, Broadcast Bionics solutions enable broadcasters to take the great content they already make and re-purpose it on other platforms, making it ultimately more sharable and more discoverable.

Broadcast Bionics has been using the batch system provided by Speechmatics to quickly produce transcripts of radio shows. These enable broadcasters to quickly edit and search audio to generate content for platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and use content for advertising and marketing, which in turn makes radio shows more discoverable.

“Working in partnership with Speechmatics has been integral to developing cutting-edge solutions for our customers. The Speechmatics technology is simple and easy to integrate, with the team delivering first-class support should we need it”,

says Dan McQuillin, Managing Director, Broadcast Bionics.

Having transformed the radio industry from the 20th Century into an interactive multimedia experience in the 21st Century, Broadcast Bionics is now looking to deliver more. Broadcast Bionics wants to speed up its customers’ ability to get content from the live radio broadcast onto social media and other platforms— including during live broadcasts—to improve presence and discoverability.

This is now possible with Speechmatics new trial technology for live real-time speech recognition. The new demo technology enables live transcriptions to be produced the moment the words are spoken.

“The opportunity we have to deliver the ultimate interactive experience—using Speechmatics’ new live speech-to-text technology—to broadcast businesses around the world is very exciting. We have trialled integrating the technology within our solutions and are keenly awaiting the full product launch from Speechmatics later this year”,

says Duncan Smith, General Manager, Broadcast Bionics