Amazon Transcribe streaming adds support for Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today, we’re excited to launch Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese language support for Amazon Transcribe streaming. To deliver streaming transcriptions with low latency for these languages, we’re also announcing availability of Amazon Transcribe streaming in the Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (São Paulo) Regions.

Amazon Transcribe added support for Italian and German languages earlier in November 2020, and this launch continues to expand the service’s streaming footprint. Now you can automatically generate live streaming transcriptions for a diverse set of use cases within your contact centers and media production workflows.

Customer stories

Our customers are using Amazon Transcribe to capture customer calls in real time to better assist agents, improve call resolution times, generate content highlights on the fly, and more. Here are a few stories of their streaming audio use cases.

PLUS Corporation

PLUS Corporation is a global manufacturer and retailer of office supplies. Mr. Yoshiki Yamaguchi, the Deputy Director of the IT Department at PLUS, says, “Every day, our contact center processes millions of minutes of calls. We are excited by Amazon Transcribe’s new addition of Japanese language support for streaming audio. This will provide our agents and supervisors with a robust, streaming transcription service that will enable them to better analyze and monitor incoming calls to improve call handling times and customer service quality.”

Nomura Research Institute

Nomura Research Institute (NRI) is one of the largest economic research consulting firms in Japan and an AWS premier consulting partner specializing in contact center intelligence solutions. Mr. Kakinoki, the deputy division manager of NRI’s Digital Workplace Solutions says, “For decades, we have been bringing intelligence into contact centers by providing several Natural Language Processing (NLP) based solutions in Japanese. We are pleased to welcome Amazon Transcribe’s latest addition of Japanese support for streaming audio. This enables us to automatically provide agents with real-time call transcripts as part of our solution. Now we are able to offer an integrated AWS contact center solution to our customers that addresses their need for real-time FAQ knowledge recommendations and text summarization of inbound calls. This will help our customers such as large financial firms reduce call resolution times, increase agent productivity and improve quality management capabilities.”

Accenture

Dr. Gakuse Hoshina, a Managing Director and Lead for Japan Applied Intelligence at Accenture Strategy & Consulting, says, “Accenture provides services such as AI Powered Contact Center and AI Powered Concierge, which synergize automated AI responses and human interactions to help our clients create highly satisfying customer experiences. I expect that the latest addition of Japanese for Amazon Transcribe streaming support will lead to a further improved customer experience, improving the accuracy of AI’s information retrieval and automated responses.”

Audioburst

Audioburst is a technology provider that is transforming the discovery, distribution, and personalization of talk audio. Gal Klein, the co-founder and CTO of Audioburst, says, “Every day, we analyze 225,000 minutes of live talk radio to create thousands of short, topical segments of information for playlists and search. We chose Amazon Transcribe because it is a remarkable speech recognition engine that helps us transcribe live audio content for our downstream content production work streams. Transcribe provides a robust system that can simultaneously convert a hundred audio streams into text for a reasonable cost. With this high-quality output text, we are then able to quickly process live talk radio episodes into consumable segments that provide next-gen listening experiences and drive higher engagement.”

Getting started

You can try Amazon Transcribe streaming for any of these new languages on the Amazon Transcribe console. The following is a quick demo of how to use it in Japanese.

You can take advantage of streaming transcription within your own applications with the Amazon Transcribe API for HTTP/2 or WebSockets implementations.

For the full list of supported languages and Regions for Amazon Transcribe streaming, see Streaming Transcription and AWS Regional Services.

Summary

Amazon Transcribe is a powerful ASR service for accurately converting your real-time speech into text. Try using it to help streamline your content production needs and equip your agents with effective tools to improve your overall customer experience. See all the ways in which other customers are using Amazon Transcribe.

About the Author

Esther Lee is a Product Manager for AWS Language AI Services. She is passionate about the intersection of technology and education. Out of the office, Esther enjoys long walks along the beach, dinners with friends and friendly rounds of Mahjong.