The European Accessibility Act (EAA) takes effect on June 28, 2025, requiring EU streaming platforms and websites to make all newly published audiovisual content accessible through features like subtitles and audio descriptions. Organizations must self-declare compliance with EN 301 549 standards and can only claim exemptions by proving disproportionate burden, marking a major shift toward mandatory digital inclusivity across the EU.
Read More
Closed captions have evolved from manual stenography to automated ASR systems over the past 50 years. While ASR accuracy has improved, challenges persist with formatting, space limitations, and verbatim transcription that includes unnecessary speech elements. AppTek's solution uses neural sequence-to-sequence translation to condense text by removing low-information content and controlling output length based on reading speed requirements. Trained on professional and synthetic data, this system improves comprehension while maintaining audio synchronization, offering a faster alternative to LLM-based approaches for both live and pre-recorded captioning.
Read More
AppTek's Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system was enhanced to better handle specialized content by incorporating three key features during the training phase: glossary integration for consistent terminology translation, markup awareness for proper formatting tag placement, and placeholder handling to maintain code-related variables.
Read More
The SubER (Subtitle Edit Rate) metric is a new standard designed to evaluate the quality of automatically generated subtitles by considering both textual accuracy and timing, addressing unique challenges in subtitle creation. It calculates the edits needed—such as substitutions, deletions, and shifts—to align machine-generated subtitles with a professional reference, offering a more holistic approach than traditional metrics like WER or BLEU. With broad applications in benchmarking and quality assurance, SubER has the potential to become an industry standard for subtitle evaluation, improving the viewing experience by ensuring subtitles are accurate and well-timed.
Read More
Large Language Models (LLMs) is the latest milestone in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the topic that has captivated the headlines and the attention of the scientific community the world over since the launch of ChatGPT approximately a year and a half ago. Despite the yet unresolved issue of hallucinations which has slowed down the faster and wider adoption of LLMs across all areas of our digital life, the latter have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide array of scenarios and tasks, including translation, making our imaginations run wild about the future of multilingual communication.
Read More
AppTek.ai is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U), large language models (LLMs) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. The AppTek platform delivers industry-leading solutions for organizations across a breadth of global markets such as media and entertainment, call centers, government, enterprise business, and more. Built by scientists and research engineers who are recognized among the best in the world, AppTek’s solutions cover a wide array of languages/ dialects, channels, domains and demographics.
