The author of this commentary is media solutions account manager of ENCO Systems Inc.
Artificial intelligence and radio have a long and fruitful road ahead.
We all know AI is used to detect faces in photos and videos — and it’s really excellent at understanding natural language too. Not just the words being said — but who’s saying them, and so much more.
An area we’ve seen dramatic improvements in from AI is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), with real-time accuracies now higher than ever attainable before. With products like ENCO’s enCaption (tailored for the radio industry), true speaker independence is achieved, with an on-premises solution that’s fast and reliable.
ENCO’s been crafting ASR products since 2006, and radio automation software for even longer — the marriage of the two is a powerful tool radio stations can use to mine their voice content (live and recorded), to better monetize, repurpose and create.
We even offer solutions whereby you can navigate audio recordings by viewing their captioned words on a screen, enabling you to click on them to navigate through the recording. Say goodbye to laborious and inefficient audio scrubbing!
Indeed, ASR is the key entry point to so many additional methods of analyzing, reporting and even understanding the spoken word.
ENCO’s enCaption-based ASR and radio tools allow you to deliver the spoken word to your listeners as live text to websites, searchable logs and transcripts, video captions (open and closed), and even captions delivered to car radio head units and streaming endpoints.
The same ASR text can help your producers and writers gain a treasure trove of additional data to work with, to help find nuggets of information hidden deep within their interviews.
Smart AI can help indicate who’s talking and for how long, or even the meaning of what’s being discussed, and where the topic is going.
Interesting things start to happen when you have such voluminous amounts of data. For your ad sales or underwriting teams, an AI can automatically determine where the Live Reads took place, and dump that to an audio clip (and text copy) for later review and sharing.
How about a computer-generated summary of an entire interview, in a single paragraph? AI can help with that, too.
The intimacy of radio suggests AI can never replace humans on the air, since the power of radio and voice needs far more than simple intelligence to be compelling.
But AI’s not just for autonomous vehicles and facial recognition — because when combined with well-designed software focused on the specific workflows of news and talk radio, it becomes an essential tool to aid your creative teams in making sense of your growing content, and gain greater value from it.
This is just the beginning.
