In fact, 41% of adults use speech to text technology at least once per day. Speech to text software is transforming how individuals and businesses communicate and get work done. However, speech to text technologies have quickly transcended daily life and have found their way into the business sphere. We presented a technical overview of the system we built and the uses we put it to at IBC 2017.Most are familiar with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, which have made their way into our everyday lives. One of the more unexpected use cases is the Audiogram tool which uses speech-to-text to rapidly subtitle short-form video for social media platforms.

The biggest user is the BBC Archive Team who’ve run it across almost a million hours of historic content. The engine we’ve build has been used in half a dozen different tools across the BBC. We’re also researching new types of recurrent neural net which offer the promise of better accuracy when very large datasets are deployed. We used our large archive of subtitled programmes to train language and acoustic models specifically for broadcast output, which we’ve found to be more accurate than generalised models. Our recent work has focused on using the open source Kaldi toolkit to build speech-to-text systems for both live and offline use. Speech-to-text is the first step in this process, as it allows a semi-accurate transcript of what’s said to be made searchable. We know there are hidden gems throughout the hundreds of thousands of hours of TV and Radio we’ve digitised, but there’s currently no easy way to find them. The BBC has one of the largest archives of broadcast material in the world, but only a fraction of it is truly searchable. Increases in accuracy mean that users will have a realistic chance of finding what they want in minutes rather than hours, especially in genres such as news or factual content.

Breakthroughs in automatic analysis and improvements in affordability mean that running it at scale over hundreds of thousands of hours of content is now feasible. It has recently moved from the lab to the newsroom as a useful new tool for broadcasters and journalists. Speech-to-text is a process for automatically converting spoken audio to text.

Live speech to text software