Captioning, transcription and translation services specialist, Access Innovation Holdings Limited (Ai-Media) (ASX: AIM), had undertaken a strategic expansion of its product suite with the launch of market-leading Smart ASR live captioning technology.
Co-founder and CEO, Tony Abrahams, said Ai-Media’s Smart ASRproduct addresses a significant market gap, targeting customers seeking a more affordable captioning service, where standard ‘out-of-the-box’ automatic speech recognition (ASR) services do not provide sufficiently high accuracy and confidence.
Mr Abrahams said Ai-Media has been at the forefront of the highest-quality live captioning for over a decade, with more than 2,200 customers globally, including the 9Network, Seven Network, Sky News Australia, Al Jazeera and the World Economic Forum.
Smart ASRis Ai-Media’s first live product that does not require real-time human curation and follows several years of in-house automation technology development. Funds from Ai- Media’s recent IPO have been used to accelerate this product launch.
By layering Ai-Media’s technology on existing ASR products, Smart ASRdelivers a significant improvement over the performance of standard ASR products in market, as independently audited. Smart ASRdelivers quality outcomes approximately halfway between generic ‘out-of-the-box’ ASR and Ai-Media’s premium service – a ground-breaking development in the industry.
Mr Abrahams said Smart ASRcombines the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning automation for improved contextual accuracy with a final layer of human-curated session-specific custom ASR dictionaries. This ensures the most important words appear correctly – critical to ASR’s more widespread adoption in sectors with clear needs for accuracy and confidence, such as news and sports broadcasting.
He said the introduction of Smart ASRopens up significant growth opportunities for the company in the Live Broadcast and Live Enterprise product lines in multiple languages. Smart ASR’sprice point and scalability makes it a key driver of platform automation and product innovation to unlock new customer segments across Ai-Media’s addressable market, which is estimated to reach US$14.7 billion in 2022.
Ai-Media is currently in advanced discussions with several broadcast customers regarding implementation of Smart ASR.
Our new Smart ASR product combines the best of our automation technologies, the knowledge and skill of our expert captioning team and the benefits of our 18 years of industry experience and proprietary dataset to deliver the best ASR solutions in market today,” Mr Abrahams said.
“Smart ASRis particularly well suited to studio-quality audio, and a predictable dictionary of defined terms, while our premium service technology is best suited to programs and situations with multiple speakers and accents, and environments with poorer audio quality.
“The launch of Smart ASRrepresents a significant step forward in Ai-Media’s technology evolution. The Smart ASR product, which is only one of a number of initiatives that will be announced in coming months, requires significantly less human intervention for each hour of service delivered.”