BBN Technologies Introduces AVOKE Speech to Text

BBN Technologies released its AVOKE STX speech-to-text system, which converts audio into searchable content.

AVOKE STX technology converts the speech in audio and video into a transcription that can be searched and analyzed.  At the core of the system is BBN's vocabulary speech recognition engine, which is speaker independent.  Applications for this technology include enterprise search, government intelligence, consumer search, broadcast news monitoring, and call center recording, among others.

The AVOKE STX system accepts a variety of audio input sources, including television, radio, telephone, meetings, webcasts, and speeches, among others, and then outputs a transcription of the audio that includes both the words and metadata in XML format.  The audio information is delivered to desktops in the same way that any text information is delivered using Web-based interfaces. 

BBN's AVOKE STX system works by separating speech from non-speech, such as music or laughter, and then processing the speech to identify additional characteristics. Each word is time-stamped, which, when delivered with the search results, allows users to navigate to any point in the broadcast or conversation. The user can listen to the original audio or watch the corresponding video directly from the search result, giving them ultimate control over access to their data. 

The system provides further analysis and information of the audio data.  The speech is segmented and marked according to speaker turns, the speaker is identified, and named entities, such as location, person or organization, are also identified.  This additional information is captured in metadata and indexed so that it can be used by any standard text searching techniques.  The software itself is language and domain independent and can be configured to run on many different types of data in the same environment.