Straker’s AI-driven services to be used by major US studio

Auckland: Straker Translations Limited (ASX:STG) will provide media localisation services powered by artificial intelligence for multiple TV series produced by a major US TV studio for the Latin American market.

The NZ$1m deal for services that will be completed by March 2020 will be the first time a television studio uses an advanced translation platform that incorporates artificial intelligence and machine translation algorithms to power automatic speech recognition to transcribe, translate and understand the nuances of actors’ dialogue while adhering to specific standards for sub-titling.

This significantly increases translation automation before finally being edited by human translators through technical quality control and post-edition workflows.

Straker’s fully integrated platform enables the studio, which is undisclosed for competitive reasons, to substantially reduce the time needed to localise TV shows by translating Latin America market, enabling quicker release times in those markets and decreasing the risk of piracy and associated security and authentication concerns.

Straker Translations CEO and Founder, Grant Straker, said this type of new service was only possible due to the recent upgrades made to the company’s RAY Ai media platform.

“Our RAYMedia platform has recently been upgraded to further automate sub-titling as a closed captioning process, providing industry-leading real-time streaming and batch speed capability. Refinement of this process is key for customers, such as TV, movie and other media production companies, who are increasingly looking to localise their content to as many markets as quickly and efficiently as possible for use on global streaming services.

“RAYMedia is an enterprise grade, end-to-end cloud-based platform that has evolved over the past eight years to remain at the forefront of the translation industry. By leveraging machine translations and its big data assets, it enables the delivery of faster and more accurate translations, lowering the time and cost to deliver compared to traditional translation services.

“While speed and accuracy are paramount, this type of AI and machine learning capability also increases the security and quality control a media company can have over their localisation services at the content level. Straker’s RAYMedia now enables the industry to have access to GEOIP authentication, video and script watermarking, IP security checks, secure file transfer and anti-piracy awareness while meeting MPAA, TPN (Audit) and CDSA compliance standards. “

The deal was closed by Straker’s new Enterprise Media team in Burbank California. This team will headline Straker’s push into media localisation - the fastest growing segment of the $50bn global translation industry.

“This team was established precisely for this type of deal. The media market is the fastest growing segment of the translation industry and due to its rapid growth, it is hard to estimate but we believe this is a $5billion market opportunity. It is also the market segment where demand is currently outstripping supply and ongoing innovation will be critical to meet customer and market demands.”

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