Amazon Web Services has taught its cloud to speak Australian.
The company announced that its Amazon Transcribe service, which delivers real-time transcripts of audio streams, has been taught “Australian English”.
The cloud colossus hasn’t revealed what it’s done to teach its AI Australian, or the breadth of its capabilities. So CRN can’t advise if it can easily comprehend the variations of Australian English as spoken by those for whom it is a second or third language. Or if it can interpret whatever the cast of Love Island is saying. Or if it could transcribe the call of a game of Australian Football or the Melbourne Cup.
What we do know is that AWS advises the service is suitable for live subtitling of TV broadcasts, transcribing in-game chat to meet accessibility requirements, court stenography or capturing meeting notes.
Transcribe has competition in these fields: smartphones now come with speech-to-text as standard while apps like Otter.ai (which has become very popular in the CRN newsroom) offer a combination of on-device and cloudy transcription services. None require any additional software development, but AWS offers Transcribe with the expectation developers will tap it rather than offering it as a simple service for the mass market.
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