GreenKey Files Patent for Automatic Transcription Process

The process—which it calls Scribe Switchboard—takes audio files and analyzes it for certain factors to determine what language it is in before it can be sent to a transcription engine.

GreenKey filed the patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office last week in hopes of protecting its copyright while licensing the process to potential partners, says chief data scientist Tejas Shastry.

“Patents are valuable to us both to protect our intellectual property and solidify the advances we’ve made. In this case, it also allows us to potentially license the process to partners,” Shastry says. “Increasingly, partners want to have specialized transcription engines, either built by us or created by them. We can deploy the method for our partners and clients to transcribe their audio files and integrate their trained models while continuing to protect our intellectual property.”

Shastry says most multi-engine transcription services tend to run audio through all engines—built to handle one spoken language at a time—and compare to other transcriptions run through other engines which can be slow. The analysis is done through a machine learning program that looks at specific classifiers in an audio file.

GreenKey’s multi-engine automatic transcription process reduces error rates by 50 percent, the company says.

“It’s increasingly common in speech recognition to use multiple engines for transcription, but it can be inefficient because you may be transcribing the same conversation dozens of times. What we did was ease that,” says Shastry. “Our Scribe SwitchBoard technology allows us to easily incorporate any other transcription engine into ours. It rapidly analyzes the audio file and determines which engine or engines—whether it’s based on language, audio quality or other factors—will be most effective in transcribing a particular section of audio, and automatically assigns the transcription to those engines.”

Scribe Switchboard has already been integrated into GreenKey’s Scribe transcription product. Shastry points out GreenKey runs different transcription engines, some even built by their clients themselves.