Transcription and translation have all traditionally felt like getting buckets of water from the well, when you should just be able to open the taps. That’s the reason why we created a simple service to help transcribe and translate videos called Unbabel for Video. Not only is it one of our latest developments, we’re also proud to announce that it’s now one of our award-winning services.
At the Annual Conference of TAUS (Translation Automation User Society — the language data network for the global language and translation industries) held in San José, California, Unbabel won the Game Changer Innovation Contest, for the second time in a row.
The TAUS Annual Conference of 2017 gathered industry insiders and newcomers to discuss the future of translation. This included conversations with the leaders of companies like Lionbridge, SDL and Oracle, and presentations from Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro and CTO João Graça were there to show how Unbabel for Video combines machine and human intelligence (Neural Machine Translation + the efforts of 50,000+ bilinguals around the world) to deliver accurate transcriptions and translations in a matter of hours.
We chatted to Vasco soon after Unbabel won the audience vote out of 19 nominees:
Why have you decided to tackle video?
Vasco: The demand for video subtitling is staggering. 85% of videos in facebook are watched without sound, so if there are no subtitles, people don’t watch them. It made sense to create a one-shot API for video subtitling in multiple languages.
Can you explain exactly how Unbabel for Video works?
Vasco: Yes, very simple, say you send a video and request subtitles in 28 languages. We do the transcription and translation and return you the subtitles. At a deeper level, we combine speech recognition with human correction and employ state-of-the-art methods to verify Quality Assurance.
What other innovations in the industry caught your attention at TAUS?
Vasco: It was an exceptional set of companies and innovations, which speaks to the amazing level of progress in the industry. The general level was really tremendous, it’s hard to single out just one!
What is Unbabel doing next? Will you make a submission to try and win for a third time next year?
Vasco: We have plenty of exciting surprises in store. Maybe next year we’ll demo something that reads your mind…
The post Unbabel wins top innovation prize for the second time at TAUS 2017 appeared first on Unbabel.
