Agora launches real-time transcription solution

Agora, Inc., a pioneer and leading platform for real-time engagement APIs, today announced the launch of Agora’s Real-Time Transcription solution. The solution provides developers with the fastest, most accurate, and affordable automated transcription, and subtitling capabilities that can be easily integrated into any app or service.

Traditional transcription services face challenges which limit their value, such as inaccurate results when transcribing voice to text in noisy environments, not understanding heavily accented speech, and the inability to accurately transcribe real-time conversations between multiple people where there is overlapping speech. Agora’s Real-Time Transcription solution meets customer demand to solve these challenges while being more accurate and cost effective than other top speech-to-text vendors. Key features include:

• Live Transcription: Transcribe real-time audio and video to include captions to improve audience reach and experience.
• Speaker Labeling: Easily label who said what with a speaker dropdown to ensure accurate speaker information with the transcription.
• Searchable Transcripts: Search for words, phrases, and themes across all transcripts. Leverage transcript as input to ChatGPT or other generative AI solutions.
• Recording Captioning: Play back audio or video recordings with closed captions (CC).
• Channel-Based Transcription: Transcribe with multiple active hosts in a channel and deliver a transcript to all participants while only paying for the channel duration—not the number of users or speakers.

While closed captioning makes any audio or video content more accessible, the real-time nature of Agora’s solution extends that accessibility to live audio and video. The transcription service provides instant subtitles for any live meeting, conference, event, cast, or video stream—while enabling other essential services such as content moderation. The solution scales from one-to-one video calls to many-to-many streaming, and can support transcription with up to 100 people in an audio chat group. In addition to increasing accessibility for people with hearing impairments or difficulty understanding a spoken language, Real-Time Transcription improves the discoverability of audio and video content without the need for replay.

Real-Time Transcription can be applied across a wide variety of industries to improve user experience and reach larger audiences. Universities can provide students with real-time captions and automatically log notes for virtual lectures. Retail brands can now reach a wider audience and improve discoverability in live shopping experiences. Call centers can quickly extract important information from customer conversations. And enterprises can provide real-time automated notes in meetings to keep everyone aligned in a remote work environment.

“Any industry that is reaching their audience or customers through audio or video will benefit from Real-Time Transcription technology,” said Zhao. “We’re excited to see the impact our solution will have on improving engagement with audiences everywhere.”

Agora’s Real-Time Transcription solution is currently in public beta, with general availability planned for Q3 2023. BCS Bureau