Village Gamer

SOVO Technologies Inc, a Montreal-based supplier of closed-captioning and transcription, has announced the deployment of the results of its important research and development investments of the last few years, which leads to improved accuracy of closed captions produced in realtime through its proprietary speech recognition technology. The technological breakthrough, combined with best-in-class operational procedures honed in over the years at SOVO, will help yield closed-captioning intelligibility results that could never be attained previously with speech recognition systems. The intelligibility of closed captions produced for live programs, which depends among other things on the accuracy and the speed of the realtime audio transcription, is at the heart of some Canadian broadcasters’ regulatory obligations set by the CRTC since 2012.

“Today, SOVO stands out even more clearly from its competition, thanks to its technological innovation and its clear engagement toward high quality realtime transcription,” said Serge Forest, President and CEO of SOVO. “Inspired by key technology developments in the world of speech recognition research, and specifically optimized for realtime transcription, the new software system offers vastly improved accuracy as well as greater operational flexibility, which will directly translate in better on-screen captions for live programs, for the benefit of our clients and of the hard-of-hearing community.”

“Our new technology, based on an artificial neural network approach, allows us to reduce significantly the rate of errors stemming from speech recognition during live captioning,” said Dominic Lavoie, Vice-President Technology at SOVO. “Already known for the speed and fluidity of our live captions, even in difficult conditions caused for example by a very high speech rate, our technology now reaches new heights in terms of accuracy, allowing for unmatched overall intelligibility.”

SOVO has a long-standing engagement towards quality and is, to this day, the only Canadian closed-captioning supplier to offer to all broadcasters a comprehensive CRTC quality standards compliance program.

On top of improving the quality of live captions and transcriptions, the new approach also allows SOVO to reduce the time necessary to bring new staff to the level required for production, allowing the company to respond even more rapidly to market demands, whether it is for broadcasters, government agencies or any other enterprise with realtime transcription needs.