20/20 Speech and Visionbytes Partner

LONDON, ENGLAND - 20/20 Speech, the equity venture between NXT and QinetiQ, announces that its Aurix st technology is to feature in a digital indexing platform is another step for 20/20's speech recognition and time alignment software. When Visionbytes - an Australian company developing systems for the creation and management of Metadata Enhanced Content (MDEC) - became aware of 20/20 Speech's technology, it realized the potential Aurix st had as a key component for the indexation, searching and retrieval of media content for its clients. Aurix st time alignment software will enable Visionbytes' key digital media management and distribution platform, the vbps PlatformTM, to extend the capabilities of existing media and related services. Incorporating Aurix st's advanced speech recognition technology into the vbps Platform will allow script alignment with audio recording, creating an exact index of each spoken word, a task previous performed manually at an exorbitant cost in time and money. Mr. Peter Fox, chief executive officer of Visionbytes commented: "Our business is about delivering innovative, metadata-enabled solutions for our clients, and ensuring they have a readily accessible and definable content lifecycle management system for their increasingly large archives of digital video assets. By incorporating the Aurix st engine into vbps, we are taking the first critical step in offering a service far beyond what is currently offered by our competitors." Originally applied to broadcast subtitling, systems based on Aurix st have recently been taken up for use in a number of applications including the lucrative US legal systems pre-trial deposition process. Ian Brotherston, managing director of 20/20 Speech commented: "With the ability to save our licensees time and money, the benefits of which flow through to their clients, Aurix st, was always going to be a successful technology. The recent take up of our speech recognition engine is proof that the market is realizing the increased efficiencies and potential savings it can help them make."