Komei partners with a startup from Silicon Valley

Businesses, Governments and Educational institutions generate ever-increasing video and audio content through meetings, communications and training. Often, this content contains important, time-critical information but remains largely inaccessible. By converting video and audio content into text, it can be made more accessible to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as searchable and manageable at word level for all stakeholders. This way, everyone has easy access to what’s been said and when, and dormant video archives are transformed into productive assets.

Koemei, developer of the first Automated Multiparty Speech Recognition Engine, and Entwine, provider of professional services and support for the open source media capture platform, Opencast Matterhorn, today announced their collaboration to launch an automated speech-to-text web-service for Opencast Matterhorn. In doing so, the world’s top educational institutions, using the open source platform, will be able to benefit from a seamless and low cost service powering captioning, and search and discovery of their lecture content.

Matterhorn is an open source platform developed by a community of experts from leading international universities which supports the integration of multimedia content into the learning environment, enabling institutions to produce, manage, and distribute lecture recordings and providing students with the tools to engage with educational media content.

While Entwine strives to provide the best possible solutions to facilitate media enhanced learning and helps institutions tackle the complexity of technology integration, Koemei is committed to enabling global exploitation of a pioneering speech recognition technology. “The Koemei / Entwine partnership is a critical step to bringing a low cost transcription solution to the Educational Sector where there is a clear and present need for accessibility” said Andy Wasklewicz, CEO and Co-Founder of Entwine.

We’re excited about this collaboration, there is such good synergy between the two companies that our CTOs can almost read each other’s minds so it’s going to be a very smooth road to our product launch in the US in early 2012” said Temi Ola, CEO of Komei, with a smile. “Maybe it’s the Swiss way!"