How Amazon is reinventing Speech Recognition and Machine Translation with AI

In the recently held AWS Summit in San Francisco, Amazon announced the general availability of two of its premium offerings - Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate. What’s so special about the two products is that customers will now be able to see the power of Artificial Intelligence in action, and use it to solve their day-to-day problems. These offerings from AWS will make it easier for startups and companies looking to adopt and integrate AI into their existing process and simplify their core tasks - especially pertaining to speech and language processing.

Effective speech-to-text conversion with Amazon Transcribe

In the AWS summit keynote, Amazon Solutions Architect Niranjan Hira expressed his excitement talking about the features of Amazon Transcribe; the automatic speech recognition service by AWS. This API can be integrated with the other tools and services offered by Amazon such as Amazon S3, and Quicksight.

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Source: YouTube

Amazon Transcribe boasts wonderful features like:

Simple API: It is very easy to use the Transcribe API to perform speech to text conversion, with minimum need for programming.

Timestamp generation: The speech when converted to text also includes the timestamps for every word, so that tracking the word becomes easy and hassle-free.

Variety of use-cases: The Transcribe API can be used to generate accurate transcripts of any audio or video file, of varied quality. Subtitle generation becomes easier using this API especially for low-quality audio recordings - customer service calls are a very good example.

Easy to read text: Transcribe uses the cutting edge deep learning technology to parse text from speech without any errors. With appropriate punctuations and grammar in place, the transcripts are very easy to read and understand.

Machine translation simplified with Amazon Translate

Amazon Translate is a machine translation service offered by Amazon. It makes use of neural networks and advanced deep learning techniques to deliver accurate, high-quality translations.

Key features of Amazon Translate include:

Continuous training: The architecture of this service is built in such a way that the neural networks keep learning and improving.

High accuracy: The continuous learning by the translation engines from new and varied datasets results in a higher accuracy of machine translations. The machine translation capability offered by this service is almost 30% more efficient than human translation.

Easy to integrate with other AWS services: With a simple API call, Translate allows you to integrate the service within third party applications to allow real-time translation capabilities.

Highly scalable: Regardless of the volume, Translate does not compromise the speed and accuracy of the machine translation.

Know more about Amazon Translate from Yoni Friedman’s keynote at the AWS Summit.

With all the businesses slowly migrating to cloud, it is clear all the cloud vendors - mainly Amazon, Google and Microsoft - are doing everything they can to establish their dominance. Google recently launched Cloud ML for GCP which offers machine learning and predictive analytics services improving businesses. Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services offer effective machine translation services as well, and are slowly gaining a lot of momentum.

With these releases, the onus was on Amazon to respond, and they have done so in style.

With the Transcribe and Translate APIs, Amazon’s goal of making it easier for startups and small-scale businesses to adopt AWS and incorporate AI seems to be on track. These services will also help AWS distinguish their cloud offerings, given that computing and storage resources are provided by rivals as well.