On April 26, the first edition of Event Tech Live U.S. kicked off at the Expo at World Market Center in Las Vegas, with more than 80 companies showing their technology offerings for meeting, convention, and trade-show planners. Featured products included ones for cloud-based meeting-schedule management, real-time audience engagement for larger virtual and hybrid events, e-mail marketing automation, drag-and-drop website building tools, native analytics, and other tasks.
Among the exhibiting firms was Interprefy, which used the show to roll out a product called Aivia, an automated speech-translation service for live and online events that is powered by artificial intelligence.
The product is able to accurately identify and translate spoken words in real time for 24 languages and also account for regional accents within each, the company says. The product works for in-person audiences as well as for those using platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and ON24. In the next year or so, Aivia will have several more languages added to its roster.
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"We have spent the last few years developing an A.I.-benchmarking platform that assesses the best engine for each language combination. By bringing those together with our event experience and technical expertise, we believe we have produced the most accurate and flexible A.I. speech-translation tool in the market,” said Oddmund Braaten, CEO at Interprefy.
Interprefy started as a company offering technology tools for simultaneous translation conducted by live interpreters, and Braaten notes that the new product is no substitute for those interpreters in certain scenarios. “Especially in regulatory sessions or diplomatic conversations, a skilled linguist will continue to outperform A.I., as they are able to read the audience and provide nuanced localization to accommodate sarcasm, humor, or idioms.”
For most professional organizations, though, the product “can provide language access where the support from professional interpreters is considered impractical or unaffordable. Simultaneous interpretation is still a premium service today, so A.I. can help make language access available for events with smaller budgets.”
