Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see
Mark Twain
There are roughly half a million deaf and hard of hearing people in the Czech Republic. Most of us don\’t realize just how limiting it must be not being able to hear the outside world. A moving car, a siren blaring, communication with the authorities, and similar struggles in fairly common everyday situations. To promote integration and understanding in the majority of our society, the International Day of the Deaf has been celebrated on the third Sunday of September since 1958. It is accompanied by a series of cultural and educational events designed to highlight the most common pitfalls and find solutions to them. And did you know that DVTV, the online television station for which we create subtitles, gives people with hearing impairments free access to all of its programs? Just contact them to gain access.
If you use the Beey app, every credit purchase also supports the operation of Beey TV, the internet TV service for people with hearing disabilities.
Your Beey Team
What Beey learnt to do over the summer
- Multitasking – now you can transcribe several files simultaneously.
- Further increase playback speed, now up to 2,5x. (We have politicians who speak so slowly that our editor was bored even with a twofold increase of playback speed 😊)
- Better communication – we hope that you like our new and improved alerts and notifications.
- It is now possible to download the audio/video as soon as the conversion of the recording has finished, i.e., before the end of the transcription.
What’s more, Beey now has a gorgeous new background and a brand new set of buttons.
Interesting news from our world
The server Lupa.cz featured a review of speech recognition technologies
We had no idea that Beey was participating in such an important test, so we didn’t even know to keep our fingers crossed. Fortunately, artificial intelligence does not succumb to nervousness and, perhaps also thanks to the hard work of our programmers and developers, the results made us very happy. We are very proud to include the verbatim assessment “The Czech application Beey did best in the test, recognizing most of the recording with only minor errors” in our newsletter. We thought as much for a long time , but it feels great to receive this validation from Lupa.
The full article is available here.
Illness can be detected from speech
This year, the Czech Republic had the honour of being the first-time host of Interspeech, the biggest international conference on speech technologies. At the beginning of September, Brno welcomed over 350 scientists and researchers specializing in speech processing and audio analysis, and more than 1600 others participated online. This year, one of the most popular topics was the diagnosis of respiratory diseases from the acoustics of speech (and non-speech). Our linguist and phonetician Lenka Weingartová was there with her presentation Beey: More Than a Speech-to-Text Editor. More on this topic as well as other papers can be found here: https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2021/index.html
The Senate in support of people with hearing impairments
The opening ceremony of the Week of Communication for Persons with Hearing Impairments took place in the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. The festival was opened by Senator Jiří Drahoš. Interesting lectures on current problems and ways to solve them were presented by several companies and non-profit organizations. The lecture on the revolutionary subtitling system presented by Petr Herian, CEO of Newton Technologies, was a success. Providing subtitles with any video content should be a matter of course nowadays. Among other things, subtitles are very popular among those living with hearing disabilities.
