By Reuters Communications
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 26, 2020—Reuters, the world’s largest multimedia news provider, launched today a new video feature that uses artificial intelligence to provide customers with access to near-instant, time-coded speech-to-text transcripts. Customers on Reuters Connect, the award-winning digital content platform, will now have access to automated transcripts from across 11 languages.
The system employs AI technology to auto-transcribe English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi, as well as provide automatic translations for each transcript into English. The feature will also identify public figures highlighted in videos and allow users to easily navigate to those sections, enabling better and faster content discovery.
Initially, the technology will be applied to Reuters core video offering and available across the majority of the real-time video feed, which will be launched as a beta version to receive customer feedback and improve the system as needed.
The technology will soon be applied to the Reuters archive of nearly one million videos dating back to 1896, which is the most comprehensive collection of archive content covering the momentous events that have shaped the world – from Lenin to Trump, WWI to 9/11, Sarajevo to Gaza. This archive modernization project will be undertaken in the coming months with support from Google Digital News Innovation (DNI) Fund, an organization that supports “high quality journalism through technology and innovation.”
“We are always looking for ways to enrich the customer experience and provide access to the data and resources our customers need to succeed in this increasingly competitive landscape,” said Alex Maragoudakis, Senior Product Manager, Reuters. “Utilizing the most cutting-edge artificial intelligence services to automate the process of video transcription and translation, we’re now delivering faster and easier access to more data than ever before while at the same time making it easier for our customers to find the content they need, quickly.”
For more information, visit Reuters Connect.
Media contact:
Heather Carpenter
Heather . Carpenter @ thomsonreuters.com