Persian Language Added to Speechmatics: A New Milestone (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: We've recently added our 49th language, Persian. Adding a new language starts with understanding both how the language is spoken, but also how it's written. Something interesting with Persian is that it can be written in multiple alphabets. There are different ways of writing it from different regions around the world and different ways of speaking it. So we had to figure out how do you transcribe both informal and formal speech from people in various regions that may be speaking the same language, but expecting it to be written differently. Strangely enough, Speechmatics learning a new language is much like any of us learning a language on a language course. We start off by immersing ourselves in how the language is written and spoken. And like any good teacher, we have something to guide us along the way. We then take throughout the term, maybe a few small tests to kind of guide our learning. Then it's time for the final exam. For us, the final exam is a test set or some data that we haven't seen before. And we transcribe it with a reference transcript that we know is perfect. And we compare the two. And we publish this as our word error rate. Speechmatics learns a new language much more quickly than we do as humans. The whole process took us three to four weeks from starting to understand the Persian language to releasing our models to customers. Handing it over to our customers was a delight. And seeing them use our tech with the new language that was really beneficial to them was perfect.