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London-based start-up Trint, the pioneer of AI-powered speech-to-text transcription, has been selected to receive one of only two large grants awarded in the UK in the second round of Google’s €150 million Digital News Innovation (DNI) Fund.
The company will receive €300,000 to support the development of the Trint Translation Project (TTP), which adds translation capabilities to the company’s widely-used AI-powered transcription software. TTP will dramatically increase the speed with which news organisations (and other publishers) create, tailor and distribute content to a worldwide audience by providing fast and highly accurate translation.
Trint’s tech is used by publishers to solve what CNN has defined as its “single biggest technological challenge”: making recorded audio and video searchable and discoverable in a fast, affordable way that doesn’t compromise accuracy. The web app takes a publisher’s audio/video and automatically generates a transcript in a few minutes.
Already a favourite of WIRED, Trint’s chief USP is that it can listen to an audio recording or a video of two or even multiple speakers and provide a written transcript of what was said. Unlike Siri or Google Talk, Trint is designed to transcribe long blocks of text and can transcribe in all the major English accents, plus 12 European languages.
AP, for example, uses Trint to generate searchable transcripts of audio and video that can be promptly verified and timed. In a pilot project, AP journalists used Trint to transcribe audio and video from recorded interviews rather than doing so manually. The project found that video producers were spending more than 45 minutes per day on manual transcription, while using Trint resulted in a significant reduction in transcription time, and also enabled users to assess the news value of content much faster.
Launched in London during 2016, Trint’s costs depend on usage, starting at €16.20 per hour for pay-as-you-go, rising to €130 for ten hours of upload a month.
“The news industry may be global in scale, but language remains the last big barrier to a truly open, global distribution of modern news,” says Jeff Kofman, Trint’s Founder.
He adds, “We are excited that Google DNI Fund, with all of its skills and vast resources, sees the value in the innovation that Trint is building. This support will be crucial in bringing this new service to newsrooms around the world. The Trint Translation Project will enable any organisation to create a single, unified platform to access translation for global distribution of multilingual content, which has huge implications for the way that we share information and news between different nations and peoples.”
