The BBC was present at the convention doing some great work with
archives. George Wright, Head of Prototyping, BBC Research and
Development and his team are working with sixty years worth of
World Service archives, that’s around 500 terrabytes of audio.
The aim of the work is to help users find what they need more
easily. The historical importance of the collection is
considerable and it will become far more useful once it has been
properly tagged with data that is searchable. The archives have
almost no metadata, so the team has created a speech recognition
system which goes through the archive and adds tags so that
users can navigate. Along with the machine recognition,
listeners are volunteering to correct and add tags to ensure
that it is all correct. The R&D team at the BBC built its speech
recognition system on top of existing open source software. The
audio from BBC World Service has its own idiosyncracies that
make speech recognition a tricky prospect for accuracy. If you
have heard past broadcasts fr