CASE STUDIES - MEDIA & NEWSROOMS

AGERPRES: Romania's Most Prestigious Press Agency

AGERPRES is the oldest and most prestigious press agency in Romania. Founded in 1889, it is a public institution of national interest that provides real-time news, press photos, press analysis and monitoring, infographics and documentary archives.

AGERPRES has a network of local correspondents in all 41 counties of Romania, and it transmits more than 600 real-time news items daily from the domestic and international news. The agency also uses a unique national documentary base that contains over 10 million documents, making it a valuable resource for journalists, researchers, and the general public.

AGERPRES is committed to providing accurate, objective, and impartial news coverage. The agency's code of ethics prohibits the publication of false or misleading information, and it upholds the highest standards of journalistic integrity.

The Challenge

Quickly and accurately convert audio or video to text, particularly interviews, for the purpose of easily creating the content and publishing the news. Be able to monitor company names, brands, institutions and other entities for a large number of audio and video files.

AGERPRES main goals:

To provide a faster and more accurate transcription of the interviews compared to all other speech-to-text alternatives, including Google speech to text.

Publish the content easily and speed up the editing process by searching time stamped text to find the key moments fast.

Monitor with a high degree of accuracy brand names, companies and institutions, products and persons.

Agerpres, Romania's leading press agency, faced a major challenge in 2022: how to achieve a higher level of accuracy and scalability in speech recognition. The agency's previous speech to text solution was slow, inaccurate, and could not handle the large volumes of audio data that Agerpres was processing. This was a major problem, as Agerpres relies on speech recognition to transcribe interviews, press conferences, and other audio recordings in order to release the news and monitor the media.

The Solution

A technology that transcribes with over 95% accuracy rate.

After an extensive evaluation of different speech-to-text solutions, Agerpres chose Vatis Tech. The ability of Vatis’s solution to convert audio into text was much faster and more accurate than the previous options, and a very important aspect was the ability to handle large volumes of audio data. This has allowed Agerpres to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its news coverage, and it has also freed up staff time to focus on other tasks.

Vatis Tech achieved a transcription speed of approximately 15% of the file length, meaning that 1 hour of audio could be transcribed in less than 10 minutes. They achieved a high content accuracy of over 95% for the Romanian language, which is considered the hardest romance language to learn.

The team implemented speaker diarization technology, to identify multiple speakers throughout an audio-video file. As a result, the transcribed texts had diacritics, could be divided into paragraphs, predefined time sequences, or multiple speakers.

"I discovered Vatis Tech a year ago, after testing several other speech-to-text solutions. I can honestly say that the difference was noticeable right from the start. Vatis was faster and more accurate than any of the other solutions I tried. A year later, I can say that it has only gotten better. The transcription speed is now even faster, and the accuracy is even higher. Sometimes it surprises me how well Vatis understands, even if the sound quality isn't the best.

It's the perfect solution for our needs and it has saved us so much time and hassle. I highly recommend Vatis Tech to anyone who needs a reliable and accurate speech-to-text solution.”

Veronica Tudor

Deputy Chief Editor, AGERPRESS

The Results

Boosted productivity

Vatis’ speech to text solution automatically reduced work time and helped the team focus more on news creation instead of transcribing the text. The audio/Video is pinned to the text so the team can quickly refer back to the source to check exactly what was said and who said it.

High quality content

With over 95% accuracy rate, the technology effectively recognizes each speaker individually and also identifies a wide range of entities like people and company names, dates, or locations from the audio files.

Achieving Faster Delivery Times

With a transcription speed of approximately 15% of the file length, the team was able to transcribe 1 hour of audio in less than 10 minutes. This allowed them to post more content online at a faster pace, thus increasing their online presence.

Business growth opportunities

Ability to take on higher business volume and fulfill even more complex projects with higher customer demands.

Next Steps

Agerpres's experience shows that achieving speech recognition accuracy and scalability is a major challenge. However, it is a challenge that can be overcome with the right solution. By choosing a solution that is both accurate and scalable, businesses can improve their efficiency and productivity, and they can also provide their customers with a better experience.

Agerpres is planning to significantly increase the volume of business it runs with Vatis Tech. The press agency is looking to expand its use of Vatis Tech's speech recognition solutions to transcribe even more audio and video recordings, This will allow Agerpres to release the news even more quickly and to provide better media monitoring services.