Companies are always turning to technology to save money and speed up existing processes. One example of a costly, labor-intensive process is that of closed captioning. But, thanks to the Omnifluent solution from SAIC (News - Alert), video providers can save money on this process while at the same time capturing metadata to help with searchability.

I had a chance to speak with Ian Broennle of SAIC at The Cable Show in Washington, DC. He explained that SAIC is a large company that has done a lot of work for the government and in 2010, it acquired Aptech, a machine translation and speech recognition company. Marrying those solutions with a staff of linguists improved the efficiency, and the company decided to reposition the solution to appeal to the entertainment industry.

Broennle showed me one of SAIC’s clients, Al Arabiya, a Web and satellite news provider that broadcasts in Arabic and English. SAIC provides the captions for the network’s programming while also serving to extend the broadcast’s reach and engagement, monitoring it for SEO purposes and creating searchable metadata. The key, he said, is using humans to help with quality control. Their edits are fed into the Omnifluent engine, and the feedback helps the solution learn and improve. It has increased its efficiency from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, in terms of percent accuracy.

The company currently works with 11 different languages and a variety of dialects. Its services greatly lower the cost of captioning and the metadata element is also a selling point for companies looking to drive traffic to their video or audio content.

For more information on SAIC’s Omnifluent solution, click here.