Introducing live transcriptions support in Azure Media Services

Azure Media Services provides a platform which you can use to ingest, transcode, and dynamically package and encrypt your live video feed(s) for delivery via industry-standard protocols like HLS and MPEG-DASH. Live Transcriptions is a new feature in our v3 APIs, wherein you can enhance the streams delivered to your viewers with machine-generated text that is transcribed from spoken words in the audio feed.

When you publish your live stream using MPEG-DASH, then along with video and audio, our service will also deliver the transcribed text in IMSC1.1 compatible TTML, packaged into MPEG-4 Part 30 (ISO/IEC 14496-30) fragments. You can then play back this video+audio+text stream using a new build of Azure Media Player. The transcription relies on the Speech-To-Text feature of Cognitive Services.

 

 

This new feature is being demonstrated at the NAB 2019 trade show at the Microsoft booth #SL6716. Following the show, we are planning to make Live Transcriptions available for a private preview, during a period of 3 to 4 weeks in May 2019. We are looking for customers and partners who are already using our service for streaming live events, preferably with our v3 APIs, and can dedicate a few viewers to watch the stream live (and not on-demand) and provide feedback. If you are interested in participating, please fill out this form. We will get in touch with the selected participants in the first week of May 2019.