Ai-Media Launches Ground-Breaking Smart ASR™ Live Captions

Automatic Speech Recognition – also known as ASR – has been an area of rich development in the tech industry over the past several years.

Many ASR systems have learned to produce automatic captions to a certain degree of accuracy, but many have been disappointing for consumers.

But not all automatic captioning is equal.

Today, Ai-Media launches our world-leading Smart ASR live captioning solution.

Smart ASR uses the power of artificial intelligence and our human-curated custom dictionaries layered onto existing ASR engines to deliver results significantly better than standard ASR products in the market.

With successful demonstrations of the product in action, two international broadcasters are already interested in implementing Smart ASR.

Our Winning ASR Combination: Artificial Intelligence, Human Curation, and Custom Dictionaries

Ai-Media’s Smart ASR is designed to meet a gap in the market where ASR ‘out-of-the-box’ is not accurate enough and our premium human-captioned service is not affordable enough for the job.

Layering our human curation onto the ASR, Smart ASR hits a sweet spot in terms of the benefit to the customer and the price point.

Smart ASR is one-of-a-kind for three reasons:

  • It is human-curated by a team with over a decade of expertise in training language software to produce accurate live captions, curating and crafting preparation materials, delivering live broadcast captions, and implementing broadcast technology and infrastructure on a global scale. For each session, our expert captioning team conducts in-depth research using our specialised in-house database and customer-provided documentation. They use this to compile names, terms, phrases, spellings and pronunciations tailored to the needs of the session, and feed them into our comprehensive custom dictionaries and custom captioning filter.
  • Our custom dictionary models have been refined using our more than 10 years of human expertise and data. Our custom dictionaries – overseen by our highly skilled team – teach the ASR engine key names and phrases tailored to every captioning session and its particular subject matter, as well as phonetic pronunciations. At the pointy end of the captioning process, they refine accuracy for particularly challenging terms and apply customer-specific formatting, standards and any censorship requirements to create the best ASR captions possible.
  • Our artificial intelligence automation brings everything together. With the influence of our expert captioning team and the power of our custom dictionaries, it delivers the optimal ASR caption accuracy thanks to our understanding of the subject matter in any given context.
 

How Does Smart ASR Compare on Accuracy?

The accuracy of live captions varies greatly. There are several options in the market that can deliver according to the needs of the consumer.

Out-of-the-box ASR

Out-of-the-box ASR – which includes the free captions available on Zoom, YouTube and Google – has no human input and, as a result, the lowest accuracy. It is best-suited to casual meetings where accuracy is not an important consideration.

Current industry leader in ASR: Lexi

EEG’s Lexi product currently tops the industry in ASR live captioning solutions. It is better quality than what out-of-the-box captions can offer, and is suited to live streaming and live broadcast situations where some level of accuracy is needed, but errors are acceptable.

Ai-Media’s Smart ASR

By laying Ai-Media’s technology on existing ASR products, Smart ASR delivers a significant improvement over the performance of standard ASR products in the market. It achieves accuracy outcomes approximately halfway between generic out-of-the-box ASR and Ai-Media’s premium service – representing a ground-breaking development in the industry.

Smart ASR is particularly well suited to live broadcast situations that use studio-quality audio and a predictable dictionary of defined terms. It is ideal for live news, weather segments and one-on-one style broadcasts. It is the perfect answer for broadcasters who need a scalable live captioning solution at a lower price than our premium service.

Ai-Media’s Premium Live Captions

For those who need the highest quality captioning available, Ai-Media’s premium, human captioning service remains the top choice. This service features high-quality live captions generated by Ai-Media’s skilled and experienced human captioners.​

It is well-suited to any situation in which high accuracy is key, including online classes, government briefings, legal proceedings, and any live broadcast and live streaming. It is also the best choice for content with multiple speakers and accents, and environments with poorer audio quality.

The Future with Smart ASR

The launch of Smart ASR represents a significant step forward in Ai-Media’s technology evolution. The Smart ASR product is only one of a number of initiatives that will be announced in coming months.

We look forward to bringing them to you, and to rolling out our Smart ASR solution further in the coming months.