SDL (LSE: SDL), the intelligent language and content company, announces that a consortium, formed by Cedat85, SDL and Bertin IT, has been ranked first out of three finalists to provide real-time, AI-powered transcription and translation services for the European Parliament plenary sessions.
The solution can automatically transcribe and translate parliamentary multilingual debates in real-time and learn from corrections and user feedback, improving its quality over time.
The idea is to help members of the European Parliament access debates on screen, including hard of hearing people who currently have no direct access to the debates. The ultimate goal is to provide an automatic transcription and translation service for parliamentary debates covering all 24 official languages used by the institution.
The selection process, which lasted almost a year, was open to all international suppliers and measured the quality of the proposed IT solution, technical support, quality of project management, quality of live demonstrations, and cost. The top three consortiums were each awarded a one year contract.
Cedat85 (www.cedat85.com) is the project leader and main contractor for this project and will be the primary contact point for any needs of the European Parliament. Cedat85 will also assume—on behalf of the Consortium—responsibility for the platform, SLAs, technical support, project leadership and will orchestrate the entire project. Cedat85 is the pioneer and market leader in Automatic Speech Recognition and Speech to text technology, operating since 1985, with hundreds of customers and more than 4 million hours of transcriptions of events, meetings, speeches, broadcasts, and telephone conversations.
Enrico Giannotti, Managing Director of Cedat85, said: “At Cedat85 we like challenges but we know we have the right technology to support us in such ambitious projects. The responsibility and satisfaction of being recognized as the most suitable candidates together with two other important players such as Bertin IT and SDL, fill us with pride and is a recognition of over thirty years’ experience of our company, which provides services and solutions based on Automatic Speech Recognition technologies and now, thanks to the collaboration with the other players in the consortium, also in translation.”
Bertin IT (www.bertin-it.com) is a provider of software solutions in cybersecurity and in cyber and voice intelligence. With more than 15 years’ collaboration with the French Ministry of Defense on Cyber Security and Open Source Intelligence, Bertin IT is also a key player in digital intelligence and automatic speech processing technologies for Enterprises and Public institutions.
Yves Rochereau, Managing Director of Bertin IT, said: “We are extremely proud to reach this top position in the European Parliament tender with our partners Cedat85 and SDL. At Bertin IT, we firmly believe in the value of bringing together the best of our technology and joining forces with partners of excellence to build innovative and impactful applications, using AI for good. In this project Bertin IT will be bringing its leading-edge Live transcription in several languages and its Language ID technology. We’re building upon the solid experience of providing robust and scalable speech technologies to our customers for many years, and hope to bring Live services one step further.”
SDL Machine Translation will provide the foundation of the consortium’s solution. The technology, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence innovations developed by SDL’s R&D group over the past 15+ years, is secure, flexible, highly scalable, and built for complex content environments. Over the past 10 years, SDL has provided the European Union and its supporting agencies with language technologies and services.
Thomas Labarthe, Chief Revenue Officer, SDL, said: “This is a highly prestigious project, and we’re excited to have been ranked first in this tender. The European Parliament, the biggest cross-national parliamentary assembly in the world, has particularly difficult challenges with members speaking 24 languages. Thanks to the combination of SDL’s best-in-class Machine Translation technology with Cedat85 and Bertin IT’s speech technology, our consortium’s end-to-end solution will set an innovation benchmark for public sector and legislative organizations looking to digitize their multilingual processes.”
Details of the tender are available on the EU tendering portal: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:412805-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML
