On Thursday 14th March 2024, a major development in speech technology was unveiled by a collaborative effort between Czech and Norwegian experts. A press conference held in Norway, and broadcasted online, showcased the results of an international partnership between NEWTON Technologies, a Prague-based company, Technical University of Liberec, also based in Czechia, and Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim (NTNU).
The NORDTRANS project, “Technology for automatic speech transcription in selected Nordic languages”, presented in this closing event also benefited from a 1.2 mil. € grant from Norway and Technology Agency of the Czech Republic.
As the main outcome of the project, the joint team developed state-of-the-art quality speech recognition technology for transcribing speech to text in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. According to final testing, the NORDTRANS modules outperformed global competitors in accuracy of transcription in all three Nordic languages.
“On average our models outperform the competitors by a significant margin; by several percents absolutely in Danish and Swedish, while in Norwegian there is a smaller, if positive, difference in the average results,” explains Petr Červa from TUL, one of the lead researchers in the project.
All of these highly accurate language modules have been integrated into the Beey platform by NEWTON Technologies, making them readily available to users worldwide for various use cases, from video subtitling, meeting minutes, and conference transcripts, to automatic summarization and further processing with a variety of AI tools.
“We all read and hear about large language models, which are mainly based on written language. Most digital content, though, is in audio or video format: up to two thirds of all internet traffic is video, which virtually always has an audio component. If you can take this spoken content and convert it into written form, then you can unleash the power of AI on pretty much everything,” comments Alessandro Cederle from NEWTON Technologies on the impact of speech-to-text technology on the new AI wave in the digital world.
For more information about the project and materials from the conference, please visit https://beey.io/trondheim or contact:
Alessandro Cederle, Business Development Manager, NEWTON Technologies
alessandro.cederle@newtontech.cz, www.beey.io