Assisted subtitling: a new opportunity for access services

The demand for Access Services has quickly grown over the years, mainly due to National and International laws. This trend is expected to consolidate for subtitling in particular, as almost every broadcaster is nowadays working with digital content: large amounts of existing assets are going to be digitized in the near future. In terms of accessibility, digitalization is a very challenging task that can be turned into a profitable process if addressed with adequate technology. In this paper we will focus on an emerging technique: Assisted Subtitling. Assisted Subtitling consists in the application of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to generate transcripts of programs and to use the transcripts as the basis for subtitles. This paper will report on recent advances in ASR, presenting SAVAS, a novel Speaker Independent ASR technology specifically designed for Live Subtitling. We will describe the technology and, evaluating its performances, we will present the promising results we have so far achieved.