LiveWyer were named winners at the BBC Transcriptor NewsHack 2017. In a collaborative partnered effort with Ericsson, we were awarded first place in the “Surprise Us” category for our live video translation prototype. The tool took subtitles from live Ericsson broadcasts and using a combination of Google Translate, Amazon Polly and Golang, generates a voiced over translation in one of fourteen different languages. The judges said they were particularly won over by implications for speakers of minority languages, who might otherwise be unable to understand current news content.

The aim of the competition was to explore the use of machine-assisted transcription technologies. Machine-assisted transcription has huge potential to benefit news organisations as well as news audiences by addressing issues such as ‘fake news’. Many teams from all over the country participated and there were some really excellent ideas. It was great to see so many journalist institutions in one room participating together for a common good.

This is new territory for us as a company and we’re really interested to see how the landscape changes this year. We’ll keep you posted with any future NewsHack events!