2023 Speech Industry Award Winner: SyncWords Leads in Live Captioning, Dubbing, and Subtitling
SyncWords is focused on automating live captioning, transcription, dubbing, and translation to the greatest extent possible without sacrificing quality. The company believes that by making accessibility fast, easy, and cost-effective, it can help spread the world’s knowledge to people everywhere.
The New York-based company reportedly last year captioned and subtitled more than 15 million minutes in video on-demand, processed more than 500,000 minutes of content with speech recognition, and live-captioned more than 300,000 minutes of events.
Beyond that, the company is worthy of recognition as an industry pioneer in offering multiple delivery options for real-time captions, subtitles, and voice translations. With advanced generative artificial intelligence and automation developed in-house, all aspects of live and on-demand media captioning and translation are now covered by SyncWords.
SyncWords’ solutions can accept content in 40 source languages and turn it into live and on-demand captions, subtitles, and dubbing in more than 100 languages.
And this year the company launched SyncWords Offline, which supplements AI-powered dubbing with human translators. SyncWords’ Sync and Caption Automation Technology helps time-code and segment all media to create subtitle files automatically from the source language using a transcript. If a client-provided transcript is not available, SyncWords’ speech-to-text technology can generate one, or human transcription support can be requested.
Through a lot of work that took place this year, SyncWords’ translation glossaries now support more than 100 languages. For prerecorded content, SyncWords works with English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Tagalog, Thai, and Arabic and will add other European and Asian languages.
Some of that expanded language support came earlier this year following a partnership with speech recognition technology provider Speechmatics. Through that partnership, SyncWords can offer live captions and subtitles in 48 languages, backed by Speechmatics’ automatic speech recognition, on more than 40 virtual event platforms for virtual, hybrid, and in-person events, including town halls, classrooms, webinars, commencements, Zoom sessions, Webex meetings, social media streams, podcasts, keynotes, product launches, and others.
SyncWords captures the audio directly from the meeting application and sends it to the SyncWords Live platform for automatic captioning.
Another addition to SyncWords’ portfolio this year was AI Live Dubbing for virtual and hybrid meetings. The patent-pending application translates speakers into as many as 40 languages in real time. It uses AI, automation, and cloud-based delivery. New languages can be introduced up until the last minute.
Event planners can deliver audio dubbing in several ways, including in-player, on-platform, or on stand-alone pages, or via custom QR codes for mobile delivery.
With aggressive language scalability, SyncWords allows users to deliver regional accents. Instant voice adaptation makes both female and male voice variations possible.
“We believe that Live Dubbing in 40 languages is a revolutionary innovation and changes how companies and video streamers communicate, enabling them to reach audiences several times larger than their current market,” said Ashish Shah, CEO and cofounder of SyncWords, in a statement.
SyncWords also this year launched a unified platform for in-player delivery of live captions, subtitles, and audio translations inside streaming media players. Features like regional accents and different voice options help increase inclusivity for viewers.
In addition, the SyncWords Live platform has been optimized to work with Amazon Web Services’ Elemental workflows using MediaLive and CloudFront, as well as other content delivery networks. SyncWords Live is also compatible with popular streaming software like OBS, VMix, and Wirecast, enabling professionals to deliver live streams with text or voice translations. It also offers support for non-Latin character sets, like Asian, Middle Eastern, and Cyrillic characters.
This year SyncWords joined the High Efficiency Stream Protocol (HESP) Alliance, a collaborative community of industry leaders working to improve the quality of experience of online viewers. As a result, Steven Tielemans, CEO of THEO Technologies and president of the alliance, called the company “the leading provider of language translations for virtual meetings.”
“We look forward to working together with SyncWords to make high-efficiency streaming accessible. We see an increasing demand for high-quality, real-time, and interactive streaming,” he said at the time.