Three Tests for Better AV Tech
Commercial partner promotion | By David Bilsborough, voxANN
In audio & visual localisation, projects and order requests are like snowflakes, no two are alike. Customer requirements fluctuate with notable variety across seasons, content cycles and budgets. Organisations will experience this to differing degrees but, nonetheless, it is common for all companies from boutique agencies to multinational enterprises. To compete within the market, building flexibility into operations helps to absorb peaks in demand, reduce pressure on teams and grow without increasing overheads at the same rate.
As a former owner of a boutique production company that supplied multilingual audio content and now founder of a software firm, I see technology as the great enabler that enhances skills and provides additional tools to meet and exceed demand. And the localisation industry has always been at the forefront of developing and adopting technology. Today, professional grade media production and great multilingual dialogue audio is no longer the remit of specialised companies but at the fingertips of every language service company.
Great technology creates direct value for both the people using it and the organisation adopting it. It provides a set of overarching benefits, the ‘tests’ to measure against, that can be broken into three areas:
Reduce the Human Effort Footprint
Technology should reduce the human ‘effort footprint’ required to complete work, removing repetitive, lower-value tasks and enabling more work to be completed in less time. This allows teams to increase productivity without simply increasing the resources required.
Maximise Human Expertise
Great technology should help organisations make the most of their team’s expertise. Great tech gives people better information, better tools and more time to focus on work requiring judgement, experience and specialist knowledge, where their capabilities can have the greatest impact and where tech solutions need human oversight.
Create New Opportunities
Technology should create opportunities to open up additional revenue streams and markets. This varies in scale between organisations, but increasing the capacity and capabilities of a team enables a business to offer new services and compete in new areas.
Why voxANN’s Technology Exists
voxANN is a UK-based technology business creating cloud-based production software for multilingual dialogue audio. Founded by a team who spent years producing multilingual audio content, voxANN aims to break down barriers to localised media production, making workflows faster, more efficient and less repetitive.
At voxANN we build our software with those three points at the forefront of our mind. We aim to create tools that help you manage multilingual audio for voice recording and transcription workflows more efficiently, faster and with greater accuracy, whilst giving access to skills and capabilities that would otherwise require significant investment in time, training or external resources.
voxANN Align
voxANN Align, released in May of this year, is an automated quality assurance (QA) tool for multilingual and localised audio in over 30 languages. Its raison d’être is to assist in this QA process for audio recorded from a script (voice over / dubbing recording) or for a transcription created from an audio file — enabling QA to be undertaken in a fraction of the time compared to manual workflows.
Align matches the audio content against the script, instantly flagging missing or amended content, mispronunciations and alternative takes. Once the QA process is complete, Align provides an automatic audio editing function which removes non-script based content such as false starts, fluffed lines, coughs or non-script chatter. This enables users with little or no audio skills to take on a complex and time-consuming editing process that typically requires additional time, skills or resources.
With Align, manual QA time can be cut by up to 50%.
Simplicity is Key
With a diverse service offering, responsibilities and projects for localisation teams to manage, simplicity is key to a software tool being effective in the time-sensitive day-to-day and execution of a project. Align has been designed to enhance, not obstruct workflows, supporting a natural progression, enabling project managers, producers and operational teams to focus on what really matters.
That ease of access and use permeates every element of design. The feeling of working in a clean, logical and familiar environment cannot be downplayed. We all have so many platforms at our fingertips that, like passwords, it can feel like we are swimming in endless management and re-learning so providing that workspace that is so easy to use and jump back into makes running through projects effortless.
As we discuss technology and its benefits to the language service industry we of course have to acknowledge the concerns often raised about the impact technology has on those doing the work. Over recent years in particular there has been a significant amount of discussion and concern around job displacement from technology. Whilst it would be naive to dismiss this threat, our belief at voxANN is that viewing technology’s value with an aim to reduce ‘headcount’ is counterproductive. Increased productivity, and thus company success and growth, is based on the ability to do more and generate more with equivalent resources. Technology gives companies the tools to further leverage their best assets — the people doing the work.
This is where a tool like Align has the greatest impact. It is built with the human user at the centre, designed to automate the repetitive, lower-value work around the QA process, leaving the judgement, experience and expertise with the human user.
About the Author
Dave Bilsborough is co-founder of voxANN, a UK-based software company building tools for the localisation and media production industry. He spent over six years in localisation and media production, previously running a boutique audio production company supplying multilingual content, before founding voxANN to build the software those teams rely on.
The voxANN team and I would love to speak with you about how Align could support your multilingual voice recording and audio transcription needs. Drop us a message via voxann.com, or contact me directly at dave@voxann.com.
