Ai-Media
Revolutionizing Live Video Captioning and Translation

Tony Abrahams, Co-Founder and CEO

To ensure compliance with accessibility legislation, the network was tasked with a mammoth undertaking. It required live captioning an awe-inspiring production featuring over 11,000 athletes and 339 events spanning 50 sports. Every event—whether airing on TV or live streamed—required high-quality captioning for in-game footage and commentary. Up to 50 simultaneous live streams could be taking place at any one time.

That’s when Ai-Media—a global leader in captioning, transcription, and translation solutions— stepped in to deliver a complete live-to-air captioning solution. Its Smart Lexi offering, which combines automated captions curated by human teams, provided the network with captions achieving up to 98.5 percent accuracy. While iCap Alta, Ai- Media’s flagship cloud encoding solution, allowed the broadcaster to seamlessly insert captions into the IP delivery stream of the network’s streaming platforms. It was the synergistic effect of these groundbreaking solutions that enabled the broadcaster to provide accurate captioning across all 50 channels at an affordable price, and garner solid viewership during the games.

“By leveraging our proprietary captioning solution with a layer of human curation on top, we are helping customers get high-quality captions with pitch-perfect accuracy and reliability,” says Tony Abrahams, co-founder and CEO of Ai- Media.

Ai-Media’s cutting-edge solutions are a boon for media companies at a time when the capabilities of many automatic speech recognition (ASR) captioning solutions seem to have plateaued. Background noise or multiple voices can significantly decrease the accuracy of these solutions, and they fail to provide the perfect mix of quality, cost, and security imperative for live broadcasts. Bridging this gap with technological mastery and industry application expertise is Ai-Media. The company’s unique technology platform combines the power of artificial and human intelligence to deliver market-leading accuracy in captioning, transcription, and translation solutions for the education, corporate, broadcast, and government sector, with a growing footprint in global markets.

The Technological Edge

The driving force behind Ai-Media’s up-to-the-minute services is its unique iCap captioning delivery network— which is the largest of its kind in the world. The iCap Network allows customers to distribute live captioned content to any display point in the world – whether onto the TV screens of millions across the globe, an OTT streaming service, a virtual meeting platform or even an in-stadium display.

The iCap Network connects Ai-Media’s ecosystem of solutions to customers, captioners and best-in-class technology around the globe. Smart Lexi—designed to bridge a long-existing gap between reliability and affordability in the ASR market—leverages the network to connect with multiple speech recognition engines across different languages. The captions are curated by a team of experts in training language software to produce accurate live captions.

For each captioning session, the captioning team conducts extensive research using Ai-Media’s specialized in-house database and customer-provided documentation to compile names, terms, phrases, spellings, and pronunciations tailored to the needs of the session. The team feeds that information into Ai-Media’s comprehensive custom dictionaries and custom captioning filter to precisely render captions.

Only after outlining the problem does the team of customer success executives at Ai-Media join hands with our customer’s engineering team to co-design a suitable framework for successfully implementing the iCap Network in their setting – which will be different for a university, a city hall, or a media organization

Through the iCap Network, Smart Lexi seamlessly integrates with iCap Alta, Ai-Media’s leading IP video caption encoder that helps media organizations meet their broadcast and streaming needs. As a fully virtualized, API-powered platform for adding live captions to all of their live streams, iCap Alta encodes all the sounds with a high bandwidth that generates noise-free audio clarity. This enables a remotely working closed caption specialist to increase live caption accuracy and make their streaming content more accessible to all viewers.

Upon kickstarting any project, the Ai- Media team makes sure they have a thorough understanding of their customer’s requirements to enable a simple ‘click-to-caption' solution that is available 24/7/365.

“Only after outlining the problem does the team of customer success executives at Ai-Media join hands with our customer’s engineering team to co-design a suitable framework for successfully implementing the iCap Network in their setting – which will be different for a university, a city hall, or a media organization,” adds Abrahams.

Ai-Media is increasingly introducing innovative new ways to help organizations maximize the value of their live captions. Its latest offering, SubSilo, helps its customers get the most out of their caption files, even after the files go off the air. The solution effectively ties live captions with time codes to a customer’s media asset management system, connects it to a proxy-generated tool that creates the thumbnail and then automatically links it all together. As a result, the captions are forever effectively tagged with that asset, making the content much easier to find.

It is evident in the way one of Ai-Media’s customers, a top Australian media corporation, is optimizing its archival functions with SubSilo and broadcasting captions, all the way back through its historical archives. The journalists at the media firm can now search a word that was spoken in a particular transcript, and it redirects them to a thumbnail where it was mentioned, which helps them locate archival content far more effectively.

Carrying the Legacy Forward

Having garnered a series of success stories where companies have overcome captioning quality issues to deliver more engaging customer experiences, Abrahams looks back at the inception of Ai-Media. He recalled co-founding the company 19 years ago with leading educator, Leonie Jackson, who grew up deaf in Queensland and was later the CEO of Australia’s Deaf Society. Jackson always had the vision to help deaf kids interact freely in mainstream society.

“By leveraging our proprietary captioning solution with a layer of human curation on top, we are helping customers get high-quality captions with pitch-perfect accuracy and reliability”

In an attempt to turn the vision into reality, Abrahams and Jackson came up with a live captioning solution to place the text in front of deaf students so they could read whatever audio was playing. Later on, the duo started providing it to schools, where teachers deployed the solution so students could read what they were saying in real-time. Its transformative impact on students and its undisputed success in the following days laid the foundation of Ai-Media—a company with the objective of making content accessible for everyone.

Building on its enduring legacy, Ai-Media is geared to continually enhance its captioning technology to build a robust and promising roadmap. The company looks forward to growing while commercializing its solutions in the U.S., European and Asia-Pacific markets. At the same time, Ai-Media is looking to win new customers by introducing affordable subscription-based pricing tiers to help small and mid-sized firms reap the benefits of its cutting-edge solutions. Ai-Media is set to continue providing consistently reliable, accurate, and timely captioning and translation solutions worldwide, taking video content accessibility to a whole new level.