Speechmatics intros Advanced Punctuation model
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 25 August 2019

Speechmatics has debuted Advanced Punctuation, a punctuation model for use in transcription for close-captioning and other video and broadcast applications.

With the Advanced Punctuation feature, Speechmatics can deliver accurate placement of full stops, commas, question marks and exclamation marks, as well as enhancing capitalisation. Advanced Punctuation has been trained on over 2.5 billion words using market-leading neural networks, according to the company.

“Advanced Punctuation enables us to capture the subtle, yet important parts of speech that have otherwise proved challenging,” says Nirel Gramage, manager of the Developer Ecosystem at Veritone. “The ability to distinguish pauses, sentences, enthusiasm and questions leads to more accurate metadata and better results, improving search and contextual understanding of the transcripts.”

“Advanced Punctuation drastically improves the quality and readability of raw scripts, making them less time-consuming to edit,” added Hewson Maxwell, head of technology development at Red Bee Media. “Punctuation beyond a full stop enriches the transcript and at Red Bee Media, we are very excited about this new capability from Speechmatics.”

Speechmatics pioneered automatic speech recognition (ASR), and with the launch will be supporting the expansion and accuracy of punctuation in the market. The Advanced Punctuation feature is available in the cloud and on-premises, with all punctuation marks being included by default for Global English, Spanish, German and French.

“While accurate transcription of words is important, a block of text with no punctuation is limited in its use, and ease of use,” said Ian Firth, VP, Products, Speechmatics . “But the addition of punctuation transforms the usability of a transcript, allowing our customers to view the nuances of speech.”