Making speech recognition real-time at NAB 2017

This year’s NAB show coincided with a big step forward for us at Speechmatics in terms of creating a productized real-time speech-to-text system. We had intended to simply attend the show, look for customers and observe at the state of play in the industry as NAB is the biggest broadcast and media conference in the world. However, after glimpsing some snapshots of our real-time capability online, we had received such interest that we decided to do a push for some live integrations at the show.

As such we were able to demonstrate the capabilities of our technology jointly with the likes of Broadcast Bionics, ISID and bitcentral for a variety of use cases.

Broadcast Bionics were already using our cloud-based speech-to-text transcription system to make radio production and audio searchable. While they used the real-time system to demonstrate how to produce immediately viewable output of a live show as you can see in the video below. Bitcentral had likewise used our technology to demonstrate how to create searchable transcripts for large swathes of video and audio metadata in an interactive interface.

And finally, ISID had set up a connection to our online real-time cloud system and, despite the habitually flaky internet that is the stalwart of big conference, the results were enthralling. Being able to watch yourself talk with subtitles appearing automatically in multiple languages is a surreal, yet exciting experience.

Especially considering the difficulty of live capture in such a noisy environment we were delighted with how both the Broadcast Bionics and ISID real-time integrations worked. Below the video shows myself and my colleague Ian using the integration at the show and just how well the demonstration worked. The other thing that became clear is that speech is a hot topic at the moment and especially real time ASR. On almost every corner we had another conversation about our ASR, another request for when productised real-time would be available. Never before has a conference so closely resonated with the tech we are developing and we are really excited about making an even bigger impact in this space going forward! Ricardo Herreros-Symons, Speechmatics