EuroVOX

Aims

EBU EuroVOX is a Europe-wide collaboration between public service broadcasters to create a speech-translate-speech platform and drive standardisation in this area.

What is EuroVOX?

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is leading this collaborative project, which aims to create an open ecosystem for transcription, translation and synthetic re-voicing for European Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs).

News Labs is representing the BBC on this project, utilising our in-depth experience of prototyping with all three core technologies and our knowledge gained from building existing tools such as Alto.

EuroVOX goals:

• Create a live speech-translate-speech platform which will allow broadcasters to translate and re-voice live video in real-time with the minimum possible lag.
• Allow access to the component technologies via an API.
• Create open standards for language technologies in order to make integration as efficient as possible.

Why open interoperability standards for language technologies?

While plenty of technologies exist to perform speech to text, translation and text to speech operations, joining these technologies together poses a challenge. Each task uses different standards for input and output, especially when trying to pick and choose different technologies across suppliers. We believe that standardisation in this space is long overdue.

Our goal is to contribute to the creation of open standards which can be published by the EBU, promoting interoperability between language technologies. This will encourage innovation with language technologies, improve the choice and variety of technologies that can be integrated and reduce costs. The BBC has a long history of contributing to standardisation.

More about this

• EuroVOX at the EBU (project co-ordinators)
• EuroVOX and the importance of collaboration between European Public Service Broadcasters in R&D activities