Real-time Subtitles for TV3 | Verbio Technologies

Real-time Subtitles for TV3

Speech Recognition
TV3 is the main television channel of Catalan public broadcaster Televisió de Catalunya. Since 1984 It has been the most watched TV channel in Catalonia and it is gaining more viewers each year. One of TV3’s main objectives has always been to be accessible to all audiences including people with hearing impairments and deafness.
Scope

Scope

TV3 has always emphasized accessibility especially for those with hearing impairments, but the Spanish law has pushed them to be even more accessible with 90% of the content on public TV requiring to be subtitled, which includes live and unscripted content.

Their old system consisted of a team of 5 people focused on each content, with them doing all of the subtitling. Due to the complexity and difficulty of the task, those five people were changed constantly to ensure errors were not being written. It was practically impossible to subtitle 90% of the broadcasted material.

TV3 teamed up with Verbio to develop an automated speaker dependent transcription system that would listen to what was being said on the TV and “respeak” the content. Once the content was repeated, the CSR transcribed the respeaker’s words and could display the words as text. More than 95% of accuracy was required in order to be able to broadcast live what was being transcribed by the machine.

After implementing the CSR engine, its capabilities proved most beneficial to TV3. They were able to have only one worker monitoring the CSR system instead of the interchanging 5 person team who used to do the subtitling. TV3 now is able to subtitle more than 90% of its content now, while also seeing more than an 80% increase in cost reduction.

90%
Content subtitled
80%
Cost reduction
95%
Accuracy
Xavier Ferràndiz
Head of Engineering at TV3
“With Verbio we were able to offer subtitles on our live content in Catalan by using a respeaking system.”

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