EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Funds, Good for Business, Latvia, Technology
International Internet Magazine. Baltic States news & analytics
Friday, 19.04.2024, 00:31
LETA, DW receive EUR 437,500 from Google for development of automated dubbing platform for video
The goal of the project is to develop automated translation and dubbing
platform News.Bridge that will combine and join automated transcription,
translation and speech synthesis tools.
Liepins said that journalists will be able to add to the platform video
news in any of the 80 supported languages, and obtain the same video dubbed in
any other of the supported languages.
"At present there are more than 7,000 active languages in the world,
which means that no matter what language we speak, we still do not understand
most of the available news. Thus, we can follow only those news items that have
been translated to a language we understand," said Liepins.
"This could change in the coming years thanks to the rapid scientific
progress in technologies processing languages that automatically render speech
into a text, translate across different languages, and finally offer
synthesized speech from the text," the researcher said.
According to Liepins, the joint LETA
and DW project will ensure availability of these technologies to broader
public, especially news editorial staff.
DNI is a partnership between Google
and publishers in Europe to support high-quality journalism through technology
and innovation, according to information published on the internet website of
Innovation Fund.
This year Google DNI funds have been distributed for the third time. In
total 988 projects were submitted, and funding worth EUR 22 million was granted
to 107 projects in 27 countries.
The project to be implemented by LETA
and DW run in the large project
category and the total costs are estimated at EUR 600,000. Google DNI
Innovation Fund has granted 70% or EUR 437,500.
As reported, EUR 50,000 funding from the second round of Google Digital
News Initiative Innovation Fund were granted earlier to LETA and DW for building a prototype for automated video news
translation.
LETA is also involved
in another similar big data project, SUMMA (Scalable Understanding of
Multilingual Media) where it has achieved quite good progress in cooperation
with British and German public broadcasters BBC and DW, the University of
Edinburgh, Swiss IDIAP research institute and four other partners from the UK,
Portugal and Qatar.
The project is being implemented since early 2016 and will last for three
years. Its total financing is EUR 9 million, of which LETA will receive EUR 1.16 million. This is the largest project of
the EU research and innovation support program Horizon 2020 in ICT sector in
Latvia.