NSC Will Supply Key Word Spotting Technology to European Government

RISHON LEZION, Israel – Natural Speech Communication (NSC) and Tadiran Communication will team up to provide a major European Defense Ministry with a solution for improving the sound quality of intercepted communications and then analyzing the audio for key words that could indicate a potential security risk.

The multi-year contract, which is reportedly valued at several million dollars, follows several successful pilots and technology evaluations over the last few months. It is based on a technical and marketing collaboration between the two companies, and will use Tadiran Communication’s radio de-noising technology and NSC's speech recognition-based keyword spotting technology.

The joint solution will be able to support multiple languages and accents at the same time and works with a variety of audio types, including landline and cellular phones and radio communications. Audio data can be analyzed in real time or saved for analysis later.

Tadiran’s de-noising technology will enable a significant improvement in the audio quality of intercepted audio, thus improving the word spotting technology’s performance. The NSC Spotter engine will then look for specific keywords in the audio stream based on a targeted sequence of phonemes that represent those keywords.

Unlike other technologies that first convert the incoming audio into text files and then scan the text documents, NSC’s technology operates directly on the incoming speech in one stage.

"The project is an important breakthrough in the use of keyword spotting technology in various channels" says Ami Moyal, CEO of NSC. "I have no doubt that in the near future the use of keyword spotting technology in the intelligence and security market will become very common, since it is the only technology that enables these agencies to cope with the huge amounts of audio that they are required to monitor."