Zone3: Technology for the Realization of Human-Friendly Broadcasting Broadcast News Transcription SystemTV Remote Controllers for the Digital Broadcasting Era Broadcast Receiver for Visually Impaired Persons

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Digital Broadcasting

Broadcast News Transcription System
- captioning from announcer's speech -

Figure 1

Exhibition Floor

Exhibition Floor

 Background and purposes
It is required to increase TV programs with closed-captions for old ages and hearing impaired. Speech recognition is a technique to convert speech into texts automatically and is expected to be a useful way to make TV captions.
In the open house, a broadcast news transcription system for closed-captions is demonstrated.

Features
The broadcast news transcription system recognizes announcer's speech in news shows and convert it into Japanese Kana-Kanji characters for closed-captions. Its vocabulary can be up to 65K words. The current performance of the word accuracy is about 85%.

It is challenging to recognize news speech because topics change frequently and new words appear every day. To transcribe such news correctly and quickly, the following features are implemented in the system.

  • The system learns words and expressions specific to news from stocked news scripts for a couple of years.
  • The system follows new words and hot topics in recent news.
  • The system learns announcer's characteristics of voices from speech database of announcers.

Future plan
The system will be improved by applying some more techniques using features of news to realize 95% of word accuracy and less running time.

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