artec’s interview recorder system receives funding for further development

artec received official sponsoring for its novel video-analysis process for use in video surveillance

Funding for artec's new state-of-the-art project is now guaranteed: artec technologies AG (WKN 520958) just received assurance of funding for its project to develop a new network-based interview recorder system. The guarantee comes from the Central Innovation Programme for medium-sized businesses (ZIM) of the German Federal Department of Economics and Technology.

artec is well-recognised as the technology leader in the area of system solutions for digital capture. As a consequence, by March of this year, the company received official sponsoring for its novel video-analysis process for use in video surveillance. "The present development project is a joint project together with the research organisation European Media Laboratory GmbH (EML) in Heidelberg, Germany. This support will provide several hundred thousand Euros," Thomas Hoffmann, member of artec technologies' Board of Directors, announced.

The present standard method of documenting and processing interviews, interrogations, training sessions or conference extracts consists of recording the material with a recorder onto storage media such as cassettes, hard drives or DVDs. As a general rule, such recording systems are not linked together in any kind of network. As a result, providing interview protocols in the form of transcripts must be done subsequently by secretarial staff or external service providers. Consequently, it can often take some time before the transcripts are available for further processing.

"Our present project is focused on developing interview recorders with speech recognition independent of the interview situation," Hoffmann explains. With this system, the video/audio recorder will automatically generate a complete transcript immediately after the interview has been recorded. This will then be transmitted via network for additional analysis and processing. A search engine will make it possible to search through the transcripts for selected key words and pinpoint down to the second their occurrence in the recording. In addition, a search wizard can transmit messages whenever correspondence to predefined signal keys or text passages occurs.

Interrogations constitute the system's primary focus, but it will be equally viable for consultations (e.g. in banks), parliamentary debates, conferences, congresses as well as a verification system for radio communications or for documenting communications in control or call centres.