McLean, VA, April 2, 2019 – AppTek, a leader in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation, today announced unmatched closed captioning results delivered by its live closed captioning system, attained by CKSA-DT television of Lloydminster, which broadcasts to the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. CKSA, AppTek’s newest customer for the live closed captioning appliance, chose AppTek for overall quality, speed and exceptional performance in accuracy, lower error rates and lower word omissions. AppTek achieved this result by using its unified neural network platfrom for machine translation and automated speech recognition to leverage features from each for noise adaptation, vocabulary normalization, punctuation prediction and speaker separation for functionally readable and understable captions.
CKSA Chief Engineer Raymond Greene said that “During evaluation and now implementation, we find AppTek’s AI-based platform to provide exceptional performance for closed captioning, both in speed and accuracy. Some cases have even been shown to outperform human captioners.”
Stephen Aitcheson, head of Appature Media, an expert in media engineering and broadcast systems, noted that “AppTek was part of an independent industry evaluation for captioning quality. The evaluation looked at multiple factors in an overall quality metric, including accuracy, punctuation, diarization and word omissions, and AppTek’s live closed captioning appliance was ranked the highest.”
While live captioning services have long been the industry mainstay, tightening budgets pose significant challenges for station operators to continue paying the high cost of these services. By incorporating breakthrough advances in live-streaming Automatic Speech Recognition, and leveraging over thirty years’ worth of speech recognition experience, AppTek’s platform is now enabling broadcast stations to reap significant closed captioning improvements plus immediate access to captioning for breaking news and live events.
Beyond out-of-the-box performance, AppTek’s solution is helping broadcast customers with real-time closed captioning that uses a neural network architecture for continuous learning and improvement. The application of artificial intelligence provides the highest quality content understanding for audiences. AppTek also enables broadcasters to have a closed captioning capability available any time of
day or night, should it be needed outside of normal news broadcast hours. Further, using the AppTek platform enables the media and entertainment industry to achieve exponential cost benefits.
As a further enhancement to its neural network platform, AppTek will be releasing new industry-leading subtitling capabilities at this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas (www.nabshow.com BOOTH: South Hall SL14917).
About AppTek
AppTek artificial intelligence and machine learning-based automatic speech recognition and machine translation platform is deployed for the media and entertainment industry as well as call centers. Leveraging over 30 years’ worth of experience its scientists and research engineers support the research and development of practical systems – AppTek enables the highest quality automatic speech recognition and machine translation solutions available anywhere for enterprises everywhere. The streaming real-time combination allows for live closed captioning and speech to speech translation as in the AppTek closed captioning appliance available to TV stations, and the Talk2me® app available on the AppStore. Apptek’s ASR and Neural MT are also available via its cloud API services.
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.
