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Automatically convert your audio and video to text using our high-end AI engines.
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Add subtitles and captions to your videos automatically using our subtitle generator.
Original captions or translated subtitles are created and edited by our subtitlers.
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Add our Speech-to-text API to your stack and/or request a tailored model.
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We make audio accessible.
Amberscript has recently been featured in Finnish media for its innovative initiative in AI technology, specifically for Finnish speech recognition. This project represents a notable step forward in our AI-driven transcription capabilities.
The focus of Finnish media on our project highlights the significance of our efforts, emphasizing Amberscript’s innovative techniques in transforming Finnish speech into accurate text. Utilizing our sophisticated language processing expertise, this initiative is set to redefine industry standards.
With this initiative, we at Amberscript are reinforcing our commitment to remaining leaders in language technology, constantly innovating to respond to the needs of a globally connected world.
Amberscript is proud to announce its recent certification by the Trusted Partner Network (TPN), a milestone achievement that highlights our commitment to excellence in the transcription and subtitling industry. The TPN certification, governed by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Content Delivery & Security Association, is a badge of honor for media service providers. It signifies adherence to the highest standards of content security and integrity, essential in our field where handling sensitive media content is a daily responsibility.
This certification is not merely about compliance with industry norms. It reflects Amberscript’s role as an industry leader and constant attempt to elevate the standards and practices in media services. Our team’s dedication to innovation and quality has positioned us at the forefront of the transcription and subtitling sector, distinguishing us in a competitive landscape.
Joining the ranks of TPN-certified companies, Amberscript reinforces its commitment to secure and professional handling of all media content. This achievement aligns with our mission to offer more than just exceptional transcription and subtitling services; it’s about being a trusted partner for our clients, ensuring that every project we handle is managed with the utmost care and meets the highest industry standards.
We are excited to announce Amberscript’s achievement of securing a prominent position among the top 20 companies on the SaaS100 list for 2023. Compiled annually by industry experts and featured on Mtsprout.nl, the SaaS100 list recognizes the top 100 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies in the Netherlands.
The SaaS100 list sets a benchmark for excellence in the tech industry and highlights the most promising companies driving innovation and growth in the SaaS sector. Amberscript’s inclusion in this list further solidifies our position as a leading player in the market, showcasing our dedication to delivering outstanding products and services to all our customers.
The SaaS100 list carefully selects online software providers based on various factors such as revenue growth (MRR), churn rate, speed of international expansion, and operational efficiency. Our inclusion in this list not only reaffirms our market leadership but also reflects our commitment to shaping the future of speech recognition technology and revolutionizing the way businesses and individuals interact with audio and video content. At Amberscript, our mission is to make all audio accessible!
We are very proud to announce the acquisition of two former competitors – abtipper.de and uitgetypt.nl. With these acquisitions Amberscript secures its position as the market leader in the Netherlands and Germany. Simultaneously, abtipper.de and uittypt.nl will benefit from Amberscript’s technological lead in the European market and can now use Amberscript’s generative AI.
Peter-Paul de Leeuw, founder and CEO of Amberscript says, “The market for subtitling and transcription is developing rapidly, partly due to legislation and platforms such as YouTube. To expand our lead and further shape our international ambitions, we acquired abtipper.de and uittypt.nl. They bring in knowledge, customers, and additional offices abroad, while the acquired companies can use our generative AI engine,” adds de Leeuw.
Endeit Capital, which invested €8M in Amberscript in 2021, financed the acquisition.
The Sprout Challenger50 contains the list of the fifty most challenging, innovative and fast-growing companies in the Netherlands. These entrepreneurs develop new markets and turn existing business models upside down. Amberscript and our co-founders have been nominated for the MT/Sprout Challenger50 of 2022!
We’re extremely happy to announce that Amberscript made it in the Top 10 finalists for the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competition! Thanks to the outstanding work of our team, we are one step closer to reaching our goal of making all audio accessible. It is wonderful to be acknowledged amongst such cutting-edge firms.
The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competition annually showcases the very best of the fastest-growing technology companies, innovative scale-ups and promising start-ups in the Netherlands. The winners are the drivers of future growth.
Podcasters can now breathe a sigh of relief, with this new integration, you can seamlessly upload audio files directly from Springcast to get an accurate transcription.
That’s right, no more transcribing the audio by hand!
Transcribing a podcast is beneficial for both the host and their audience. It increases accessibility, searchability, and engagement with the content.
For the host, transcribing their podcasts allows them to reach more people who may not be able to listen due to hearing impairments, may be a non-native speaker or situated in a sound sensitive environment.
It also enables captions for videos on social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, which can lead to an increase in viewership.
Additionally, transcripts make episodes much easier to find when searching online since keywords are included.
Audiences benefit from transcripts because they are able to pause or review covered material easily without having to rewind audio. In short – transcripts make engaging with the audio simpler.
Ultimately, having transcriptions available makes podcasts more accessible and easier to interact with, making them a worthwhile addition for both hosts and listeners alike.
All you need to start turning your audio to text is a Springcast and an Amberscript account.
There’s no need to worry about switching between multiple websites or services; everything is situated right in your Springcast account.
Step 1: Create an Amberscript account
Step 2: Link your Springcast and Amberscript account by getting in touch with our Support team.
Step 3: Recording your podcast!
Step 4: Upload to Springcast and get your automatic transcript
With only a single push of a button in the Springcast dashboard, creators can effortlessly transcribe their podcast episodes!
Our state-of-the-art AI, will analyze the speech and generate a transcript of the episode – with up to 85% accuracy. Depending on how long your episode is, this should take anywhere between 15-20 minutes to generate the transcript.
Once complete, you can review the text and make any necessary edits.
By combining the power of Springcast and Amberscript together, podcasting is easier than ever! Whether you’re a beginner or a veteran podcast creator, transcribing audio files will help expand your audience and improve your overall production quality.
Get started with Springcast and Amberscript today!
Reduce costs, improved accuracy, and faster turnarounds.
Our founders Peter-Paul de Leeuw, Thomas Dieste, and Timo Behrens sat down with Silicon Canals to discuss how we combine the power of AI and humans to create accurate subtitles and transcripts.
Are you ready for the grand final of the largest scale-up competition in the Netherlands?
Tune in to watch our very own Peter-Paul de Leeuw and Jolien de Louw represent Amberscript on Sunday, they will be competing against 3 other Dutch scale-ups to win 1 million euros to invest in their business. We can’t wait to find out the winners!
You can watch the final this Sunday (12th of June) at 17.00 on RTL-Z.
Founders Fridays is a new StartupAmsterdam initiative that showcases local entrepreneurs who help strengthen their ecosystem.
The series A raise was led by Endeit Capital, who will support Amberscript’s path to become the number one subtitling player in the world.
Amberscript has raised € 8.65 million Euro to further its mission of making all audio accessible by providing reliable, innovative, and best-in-class solutions that bring the world closer together. The series A raise was led by Endeit Capital, who will support Amberscript’s path to become the number one subtitling player in the world. Find out more about which pitch-deck was used to achieve this.
Amberscript has raised € 8.65 million Euro to further its mission of making all audio accessible by providing reliable, innovative, and best-in-class solutions that bring the world closer together. The series A raise was led by Endeit Capital, who will support Amberscript’s path to become the number one subtitling player in the world.
Amberscript has raised $10m USD to further its mission of making all audio accessible by providing reliable, innovative, and best-in-class solutions that bring the world closer together. The series A raise was led by Endeit Capital, who will support Amberscript’s path to become the number one subtitling player in the world.
Press Release: Endeit Capital Leads Series A Round for Subtitle and Transcription Company
● Amberscript has raised $10m USD to further its mission of making all audio accessible by providing reliable, innovative, and best-in-class solutions that bring the world closer together
● The series A raise was led by Endeit Capital, who will support Amberscript’s path to become the number one subtitling player in the world
● Amberscript will use the fresh capital to further roll-out best-in-class solutions with a particular focus on the German and Dutch market
Amsterdam, 4th November 2021 – Today, Amberscript, the AI speech recognition company, announces that it has raised $10m to further its mission of making all audio accessible. The Series A raise was led by Endeit Capital (Parcellab, BUX), a leading German-Dutch growth capital firm founded by former executives of media company Endemol, validating the potential for Amberscript’s technology in the media industry.
Amberscript aims to make the power of language accessible to everyone and to bring the world closer together. By combining domain-specific AI speech recognition engines with a ‘human layer’ of transcribers, Amberscript produces subtitles with the highest accuracy in the market, delivered eight times faster than traditional manual methods.
This offering is particularly valuable for the many media companies, governments, and educational institutions such as universities, which are legally obligated to make their audio and video content accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.
Amberscript was founded by Peter-Paul de Leeuw and by Thomas Dieste and Timo Behrens who believe in the strength of intelligent empowerment and diversity. Amberscript is also home to 40 employees from more than a dozen nationalities speaking over 25 languages. With the strategic support of Endeit Capital, the company will accelerate the development of best-in-class products, and continue rolling out reliable and high performing solutions that are easily accessible for everyone.
Peter-Paul de Leeuw, founder and CEO at Amberscript, explains:
“Our mission at Amberscript has always been clear: provide high-quality subtitles and transcriptions to make all audio accessible.Yet, with an average university producing over 50 hours of video every day, it is physically impossible to transcribe and format the volume of subtitles needed in a fully manual way. So, we spent the last three years hiring the best people and building the best technology to allow us to automate and optimize this process as much as possible. Now, we’re ready to scale.”
“Our mission at Amberscript has always been clear: provide high-quality subtitles and transcriptions to make all audio accessible.
Yet, with an average university producing over 50 hours of video every day, it is physically impossible to transcribe and format the volume of subtitles needed in a fully manual way. So, we spent the last three years hiring the best people and building the best technology to allow us to automate and optimize this process as much as possible. Now, we’re ready to scale.”
Amberscript is already on its way to fulfilling that mission. The company, operational since 2018, counts various arms of both German and Dutch governments, universities, public television broadcasters, and companies like Disney and Puma amongst its clients. Last month, the team announced its latest innovation, AI subtitle formatting: the in-browser automatic transformation of transcripts (text only) to subtitles (text formatted to readable subtitles) using Amberscript’s AI to meet standards of the likes of Netflix and the BBC with no manual input.
Hubert Deitmers, Managing Partner at Endeit Capital, explains:
“During my time at Endemol, I witnessed rapid changes across the industry with regard to subtitling. This industry is continuing to accelerate today thanks to drastic advances in artificial intelligence. Amberscript’s AI subtitling technology is already world-leading, and its team has the talent and ambition to become market leaders – its potential within the media industry is immense.”
Endeit Capital’s investment in Amberscript is part of the firm’s strategy to boost scale-ups across Europe and follows the approximately $300 million fund, Endeit Capital III, which closed in April. This new Series A funding, coupled with Endeit’s experience of growing businesses in more than 30 countries, will fuel Amberscript’s path to become the number one subtitling player in Europe.
Notes to Editors:
By the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States and the Web Accessibility Directive (EU 2016/2102) in Europe.
Further information available– Cases and examples of how deaf and hard of hearing have been included in society by using Amberscript– Data and information on 95% of the education sector in Europe not being accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, despite legislation that it should– Data and information that automatic captions, such as those found on YouTube, are not good enough to include the deaf and hard of hearing
Press ContactVictoria JodlKekst CNC[email protected]+49 152 52423959
Laura Winn[email protected]+447809442957
About AmberscriptFounded in 2017, and based in Amsterdam and Berlin, Amberscript makes audio and video accessible by developing software and services to create affordable subtitles: customer-specific speech recognition engines, an intuitive text editor, and a platform for subtitlers. One-third of Dutch municipalities use Amberscript to automatically subtitle meetings, and all Dutch universities use its services to provide transcripts of lectures. Amberscript’s automatic speech-to-text engines are developed with a team of dedicated language experts, resulting in the highest accuracy on the market. For more information, visit https://www.amberscript.com/fr/ .
About EndeitFrom the home markets of the Netherlands and Germany, Endeit Capital specializes in investing in tech scale-ups that have outgrown the start-up phase. Endeit supports these companies with capital and management guidance to reach maturity. In doing so, Endeit’s partners draw on their broad experience in expanding and internationalizing operations through buy & build, as the founders have successfully done at Endemol. Endeit has raised a total of half a billion euros in investment capital and currently has 14 companies in 7 countries in its portfolio. Current and previous Dutch portfolio companies include Bux, 3D Hubs, Roamler, Albelli, MetrixLab, Unamic, and Eyeworks. ParcelLab, Gastrofix, Comtravo, Contorion, Chronext, Tourradar and Smartclip are investments of Endeit in theDACH region. In the UK and Nordics, the company has invested in Blis, Unruly, Leadfeeder, and Stravito.For more information, visit www.endeit.com
The importance of video in the marketing mix continues to grow. But have you ever thought about the millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers? With several steps, you can start making your video content more accessible right away.
Amberscript rebranded
Amberscript has announced its rebranding today! The brand concept reflects the transformative journey of language from audio to text through the visual elements that carry an abstract side (in a reference to audio waves) and a clear side, where audio takes the text form. The concept, developed by the Dutch agency Bravoure, manifests Amberscript’s values: innovative, human, and reliable.
“We wanted a brand that represented the stage we are in. Amberscript grew exponentially in the past few years, we gained over a million customers from everywhere around the globe, offering digital accessibility solutions from German to Dutch and Canadian to Colombian government organizations, education, and private companies. What started as a tool to support mainly students writing their thesis is now a global transcription and subtitling provider – we wanted a brand that represents this growth and our commitment to making audio accessible for everyone .”
Peter-Paul de Leeuw – CEO at Amberscript
Besides the improved design and usability, the website and platform now offer more functionalities and services, such as translated subtitles.
For more information, contact [email protected]
In collaboration with partner company Amberscript, Company Webcast has been offering subtitling software specifically for political meetings since 2018. A municipality such as Bernheze pays 1,500 euros per year for this plus 25 euros per hour of meetings, which keeps the total sum under 5,000 euros.
We’re proud to announce Amberscript, together with startups: Felyx, Trunkrs, Sensorfact, Trengo, Relay42, Zivver, Mapiq, Somnox and Wizenoze, has been selected to join the Techleap.nl Compass programme.
This global expansion program provides access to experts, supports strategic planning, and delivers the market intelligence we need to scale internationally.
You can read more about the Compass programme on the official Techleap.nl website:
CES® is one most influential tech event in the world proving ground for breakthrough technologies and global innovators.
From January 11th until January 14th, the selected Dutch participants will have the opportunity to take the global stage for innovation, presenting to 170,000 companies and investors from 160 countries.
Amberscript helps governments, universities and (media) companies to avoid the costs and pain of manually transforming audio or video to 100% correct texts and subtitles.
We make audio and video accessible by developing software and services to create affordable subtitles: customer-specific speech recognition engines, an intuitive text editor and a platform for subtitlers.
In the last two years, Amberscript has served over 600,000 customers, turned over 6,800,000 hours of audio into text and helped European municipalities, universities, and enterprises to meet Digital accessibility standards.
January 11th to 14th 2021.
The event, that usually happens in Las Vegas, will be virtual in 2021.
Registrations will open on the 1st of December 2020 and can be done via the CES website.
In the past year, the Parliament and Amberscript have developed together a speech recognition model specifically trained to recognize political speech in the parliament. Several hundreds of hours of recordings of the parliament have been used to train the AI-based speech recognition.
The technology makes use of deep neural networks and was designed to specifically understand parliamentary speech, local accents and political topics. Up to this point, speech recognition was used to create parliamentary meeting minutes in a more efficient way.
To leverage the large potential of this technology even further and increase the inclusivity of politics within the state, the Parliament had the vision to automatically create subtitles for their live video stream in which citizens can follow the debates within the parliament. Subtitles allow individuals with auditory impairments to understand the debates more easily.
After jointly developing the solution, the first debates were streamed on 28th, 29th and 30th of October with automatically generated live-subtitles.
The streaming was an astonishing success and for many speakers, an accuracy of more than 90% was measured, which makes it possible for deaf and hard of hearing to closely follow the speakers.
The technology is still being refined, but the Parliament and Amberscript will keep working together to improve the live subtitles even further in the following years to fulfil their vision of publishing all videos in an inclusive manner and breaking down barriers for citizens with (auditory) impairments.
All following sessions will be available on the website of the Parliament: https://www.landtag-mv.de/aktuelles
For more information about this and other solutions, please contact [email protected]
Amberscript is one of the hottest AI startup to keep an eye on, according to SiliconCanals.com.
“The company has achieved market-fit and is currently scaling rapidly”, and “This service helps users avoid the costs and pain of manually transcribing their interviews, meetings, or other audio.”
Not too long ago we had a little visit from the Dutch tv-channel RTL Z for the show “Next Level”. We thoroughly enjoyed having them around for the afternoon and explaining what we do and how we do it. Curious to see what else we talked about? You can watch the video here:
A collaboration between Amberscript and SpeakSee will bring digital accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing to the next level.
The two companies have received official recognition and funding from the Dutch Government. Being selected as one of the most promising and innovative companies in the country, Amberscript and SpeakSee will work on a product that makes live meetings fully accessible for everyone with hearing disabilities.
There are almost 1.5M deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the Netherlands. The Dutch government is concerned about their ability to be part of the business environment unimpededly. Amberscript develops Europe’s best software to transforms speech to text in several languages. However, the devices people use to record the audio are not made for transcription purposes and often the audio comes out with insufficient quality. SpeakSee, on the other hand, develops intelligent microphones, which isolate the noise and capture only the speech.
The collaboration of Amberscript and SpeakSee will integrate their products to provide the market with good quality recordings which can then easily be converted into text. The idea is to make everything live which means that deaf and hard of hearing people can now have meetings and conversations with ease. Also, to perfect the process even more, Amberscript will provide transcribers who will edit the text in real-time from a distance. This will ensure up to 100% accuracy in the transcribed text with multiple participants in the conversation.
The objective of the project is to provide real-time transcriptions to the deaf and hard of hearing, 24/7. This leads to much greater self-reliance and less dependence on third parties such as interpreters, which are expensive and scarce.
In addition, there is also a great opportunity for transcription within courts, lectures or business meetings.
There are over a million people in the Netherlands who suffer from hearing disabilities. A third of them are completely deaf. These people face many challenges in their day-to-day lives, such as:
Due to these problems, most of the abovementioned people are excluded from vital parts of social life, namely communication with peers. Amberscript is about to change that.
We came up with a viable solution – creating an app that would help hard-of-hearing people to participate in daily conversations. 90% of people that we surveyed would appreciate having such an app and would use it on a daily basis. This means that there is sufficient demand on the market for such a product.
Recently we received a subsidy from SIDN fonds, an organization that supports innovative digital products aimed at making a social impact. We are going to use this additional funding to develop the app for iOS and Android that can perform live transcription. This also requires adjustments in our current language models to secure good performance, even in noisy conditions. Besides instant and accurate transcription, we are putting a lot of emphasis on the user-friendly interface of the mobile app.
We hope that our app will make a noticeable difference for deaf people in Dutch society and we will keep you updated on any progress that we make!
Read the article Amberscript: live transcription for people with hearing problems
In Amberscript we found a reliable partner that, even better than Google, converts Dutch audio recordings into subtitles. ” – Olaf Lawerman, director of Company Webcast
Amberscript and Company Webcast facilitate municipalities with automatic speech-subtitling of board and committee meetings. As a result of the ‘digital accessibility’ decision, municipalities have been obliged since 1 July 2018 to make (newly) published content, including council meetings, accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. Many government agencies are still lagging behind this obligation. Because Company Webcast and Amberscript – www.amberscript.nl – completely replaced manual subtitling of broadcast council meetings by a system with artificial intelligence not only a substantial saving in time, but also a saving in money is achieved.
Amberscript: a start-up with potential. ‘We serve customers who want an audio fragment to a 100 percent transcript. Amberscript delivers 80 percent good text, the last 20 percent write the customers themselves’, according to founder Peter-Paul de Leeuw (32).
The life of Peter-Paul de Leeuw, who founded Amberscript in 2017, always looked like that of a highflyer in the making. The gymnasium in Bilthoven, bachelor economics in Utrecht, and a master’s degree in business administration at the Erasmus University. Then rolled over to Accenture, where he earned his money for five years as a consultant. But entrepreneurship drew. How you, as a corporate director, can become a successful entrepreneur can of course be taught in one place: business school Insead. “Yes, really, I wanted to improve the world. The only thing is: with many new technologies there is a hypecycle. From one day to the next everyone talks about it and suddenly nobody else. 3D printing is such an example. Between the launch and the moment it is applicable is often a few years. At Insead, I discovered that the technology behind speech recognition was over that hypecycle and became commercially interesting. There is only a huge gap between the American, Chinese and European markets. Gigantes like Google are certainly working on it, but the development power for the Dutch market is lacking. Not surprising: the choice between 10 percent of the Netherlands or 1 percent of the English-speaking market is made quickly. ‘
In order to be able to carry out his plans, he obviously needs money. Already very quickly, he arrives at the young self-made millionaire Paul Montagne of Venture Builders. This guy has estimated equity of € 9 million on the Self-Friends list of millionaires <40.
Last week, Peter-Paul was a guest at BNR Zakendoen. Here he explained Amberscript on the basis of a short but powerful pitch.
Listen to the full interview here (in Dutch):
The city council, a group of elected representatives of the people within a municipality, checks the day-to-day management performed by the mayor and aldermen. They regularly debate in local council meetings.
During the municipal council meetings important issues are discussed for the residents of these municipalities. Municipalities see it as their duty to make the content of the municipal council meetings public and accessible to all Dutch people, including those with disabilities. There are about 120 Dutch municipalities that work together with Company Webcast, which is part of Euronext, and which is the market leader in the field of webinars and webcasts to offer recordings of meetings online. Company Webcast uses Google’s voice recognition to automatically provide these webcasts with subtitles. However, the feedback was that the quality was not good enough for the deaf and hearing-impaired who represent 10 to 15% of the European population.
The municipalities were determined to act in a cost-efficient manner and to enable hearing-impaired people to remain involved in decision-making within municipalities. In addition, they are now also obliged to do so. On the 26th of October 2016, the European Parliament and the EU Council drafted Directive EU 2016/2102 ‘on the accessibility of websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies’. This guideline is also known as ‘Digital accessibility’ and has been translated into local legislation. In practice, this means that every (semi) public organization of the EU member states is obliged to ensure that their websites and apps are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.
Some municipalities, such as the municipality of Enschede, have opted for the Amberscript speech recognition engine which produces subtitles without human intervention that are well understood by deaf and hearing-impaired people. In principal, this was already a lot better than the old situation, but to further increase the accuracy, Amberscript was given a list of words that are often used by the municipalities. With that, Amberscript trained a specially adapted voice recognition engine for the municipalities.
Some other municipalities, such as the municipality of Barneveld, have chosen to have the subtitles perfected through Amberscript’s ‘perfect’ service. In both cases, the subtitles are offered via an API and sent back to the ‘direct’ and the ‘perfect’ service via the API.
Read the full article on how Amberscript is helping Jaco on following the city council meetings.
Do you want to get started yourself?
The deaf Jaco Hoeve from Staphorst can now closely follow the council meetings of the Staphorst municipality via the internet. The words of the politicians are subtitled. Hoeve calls it ‘great’ in one word.
Amberscript: a startup with potential. “We serve customers who want to go from an audio fragment to a 100 percent transcript. Amberscript delivers 80 percent good text, the last 20 percent is written by the customers themselves”, says founder Peter-Paul de Leeuw (32).
The Faculty BMS (Behavioral, Mananagement- Social-Sciences) from the University of Twente uses Amberscript’s Automatic Speech Recognition software to give researchers and students of the faculty the opportunity to automatically transform audio recordings into text. By using automatic speech recognition (ASR), researchers lose less time on creating transcripts manually. The time (and budget) saved can be reinvested into what really counts: Innovative research.
The BMS Lab is the innovation booster for the Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, Management Sciences and Social Sciences at the University of Twente. The aim of the BMS Lab is to stimulate innovation within the research community by inspiring researchers to use new technologies and methodologies. By doing so the BMS Lab stimulates researchers to seek new insights and strive for excellent research results.
Transcription (converting audio into text) is a crucial but time-consuming activity in the process of qualitative research. Researchers need an accurate transcript in order to be able to carry out analyzes, but transcribing manually is a tedious process. Jan Willem van ‘t Klooster, Managing Director of the BMS Lab: “For some time now there were questions to the BMS Lab about whether technology could accelerate this process. So far we didn’t find one, but with Amberscript we were convinced of the quality and user-friendliness.”
Amberscript uses state-of-the-art speech recognition technology to speed up the transcription process. With the help of artificial intelligence, audio recordings are transformed into a transcript within a few minutes. Subsequently, researchers can make adjustments where necessary. Eventually the transcript is further processed in analysis programs such as SPSS, MAXQDA or Atlas.
Until now, researchers at the University often hired students who had to manually type out interviews and group discussions. It turned out that transcribing and editing an interview of 1 hour could easily take up to 6 hours of manual work.
By automating this process, a considerable amount of time can be saved and more transcripts can be generated in less time. One student states: “The automatic transcripts from Amberscript need some editing, but it saves a huge amount of time.”
Students and researchers can request ‘transcription hours’ centrally in the BMS Lab. An admin user transfers transcription hours to users and in the admin dashboard the BMS Lab can easily identify which projects consume how many hours.
Next to that, the BMS Lab supports users with lending out the right recording equipment and with advice on how to record high quality audio. The BMS Lab also advises on the right way to deal properly with confidential information from respondents.
At the moment researchers and students work with Amberscript’s user-friendly editor.
In addition, the same technology can also be used for ‘more challenging’ purposes. The BMS Lab is now developing a research application that directly uses Amberscript’s ‘speech-to-text’ engine via an API.
With this integration, researchers can immediately obtain results about the language used in experiments. The combination of several input channels in this app opens the doors to developing a more complete picture of respondents inside and outside of the lab environment.
According to Jan Willem van ‘t Klooster, the project ‘Amberscript’ is already a success. In recent months, the demand for automatic transcription has increased significantly. Researchers regularly request higher volumes of transcription hours and students and actively use Amberscript.
The reason for this: The old-fashioned way of manual transcription is time-consuming and can be frustrating to a lot of people. Amberscript helps researchers keep the focus on what really adds value: High-quality Research.
Read the article from the University of Twente: Interviews
When Peter-Paul said yes to this interview I was really excited, as it’s very hard to catch him in his busy schedule. Yes, this is the life of an entrepreneur of a young startup.
A quick mention of what Amberscript does – it provides solutions to automatically convert audio to text, backed up by AI technology. It was founded at the end of 2017, and is already serving over 12,000 users. Up to date, close to 500.000 minutes of audio has been converted to text.Jo: Flashback to when you were 10 years old, what did you want to be when you grew up?
PP: I wanted to be an inventor, who invents new technologies or introduces new products to the world, like Thomas Edison. Inventing is something very cool to me. As a child, I didn’t really rationalize why it’s cool. I just found it cool.
Jo: Please name 3 words that best describe you.
PP: I would say:-
progressive: I’m always running around, making changes. I’m also very open to changes – when I see a problem I want to solve it
curious: I like to read about everything
competitive: if I do something, I want to be the top one (Jo: OK boss, we got the hint.)
Jo: When did you discover your interest to be an entrepreneur? What has inspired you?
PP: When I was 13, it became a trend for people to buy ringtones from mobile service providers, like Jamba (which doesn’t exist anymore). People needed to pay a substantial amount of money for only 1 or 2 ringtones.
I realized that a data cable, which wasn’t included as part of the packaging of a mobile phone at that time, could connect the phone to a computer. And you can easily download ringtones to the phone that way. So I created a pack, including a data cable and a disc burnt with various ringtones. I then sold close to a hundred of those packs on eBay. It was quite some money for a kid.
That was my first experience as an entrepreneur, and I loved it.
Jo: As you grew up, did you have an influential figure, or a role model?
PP: My dad, who is an entrepreneur himself. He was the first one to introduce South African wine to the Netherlands after apartheid was abolished and the boycott ended, distributing it through supermarkets such as renowned Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn.
Jo: Do you have a skill or talents that most people don’t know?
PP: I played waterpolo in the highest Dutch league (eredivisie) when I was a boy. I seemed to have endless energy back then, and used to have 8 practice sessions a week (laugh out loud). I made it all the way to the team which was training for the Olympics. But I stopped when I went to college, because I knew I couldn’t spend enough time to practice anymore, to stay at the top (and got kicked out of the team that was going to the Olympic Games).
Jo: What have been the major milestones in your life so far?
PP: Of course, to become the founder / CEO of Amberscript, but our biggest milestones are still ahead of us
Jo: Finish this sentence – “On Sunday mornings, you can usually find me…”
PP: On Sunday mornings, you can usually find me playing football. This is my routine nowadays.
Jo: As a prior management consultant, what are the necessary skill sets it has equipped you with? Are there any constraints in your thinking pattern because of this profession?
PP: Thanks to that job, I’m able to work hard, and see working hard as standard. But to me, working hard doesn’t necessarily mean spending long hours. It means being efficient at work.
Also, it has trained me to have structured thinking, and to keep a bigger picture in mind.
On the other hand, because I’m very used to multi-tasking, I can easily get bored working on just one subject/activity. And as a strategy consultant, I had to know a little bit of everything, rather than gaining a more specialized skill set.
Jo: Career-wise, do you have any regrets? Is there anything you wish you could have done differently?
PP: I have worked on many side projects before working full-time for Amberscript, but they didn’t work out. If you want to do something properly, you have to give it your best shot, and put your heart and soul into it.
Jo: What culture do you want to build at Amberscript?
PP: That’s a big question. We want to be “undercover superheroes”, who are missioned to save people’s time for something better in life, rather than spending it on typing out the interviews, adding video subtitles, etc. Spending time on these things can be punishing you know. To achieve this, we need to put our customers first, be inventive, and be patient.
We’re still a very young company, so people get larger responsibilities here than in bigger companies. With that comes with the responsibility of owning your work, because nobody else could claim that ownership.
We value honesty and transparency, even though they can make you vulnerable. But be honest and transparent nevertheless. We clearly believe in the Dutch values (smile)!
We also believe in” work hard, play hard”. Long hours are not encouraged, but we do encourage high efficiency. And regular cool events with the team!
For any company, I believe you should never settle and stop moving. You always need to keep looking to the future with a vision to become 10x of what we are now. Every day is another opportunity to grow more.
Jo: In the year 2300 (should our planet still exist then), how would you want to be remembered?
PP: As someone who has made something happen, which otherwise wouldn’t have been there if it were not for me, even if it’s just a small dent in the universe (laugh out loud).
Jo: Any words for the people out there who want to try out entrepreneurship but haven’t done so yet?
PP: Always keep your eyes open and chase every lead that could possibly guide you to this path. Shoot me an email; I would happily help you along the way.
As promised, this is the email: [email protected]
The Amsterdam-based Amberscript has developed Saas software that automatically converts audio into text. By clicking on a word you can easily go back to the original sound clip. This also makes it possible to quickly correct something, for example when working on interviews.
Amberscript is software that uses speech recognition technology to convert speech into text very easily, very quickly, and automatically. We use our own engines and an editor for this. The engines can convert professional audio recordings into written text with 95 percent accuracy, while the editor helps to improve the final percentages. The lower the quality of the audio, the less accurate the automatic transcription is.
How exactly does it work?You upload your audio or video file into the editor and it transcribes your file in minutes. As soon as it is ready, you will be notified. Very cleverly, the editor “glues” the transcript to the file you submitted. This allows you to easily find words and listen to the corresponding recording and quickly make corrections. After editing, you can share the result with colleagues and friends in different file formats. You can also let our human transcribers do the corrections so you don’t have to. With the Amberscript tools, this work is faster than with regular transcriptionists and it is cheaper.
Writing out interviews is an unpleasant activity that needs to be done. How convenient is it to have audio and video files immediately available as editable text?
“Amberscript is software that uses speech recognition technology to convert speech easily, quickly and automatically into text. We use our own engines and an editor. The engines can convert sound recordings to written word with a 95% accuracy, and the editor helps to polish the last inaccuracies. The poorer the quality of the audio, the worse the automatic transcription is. “
“You upload your audio or video file in the editor and the transcription happens in a matter of minutes. Once it is ready, you will receive a message. The editor then “sticks” the transcript to the file you submitted. This way you can easily make corrections while listening to the accompanying recording. When done editing, the result can be shared in different file formats. You can also have the editing done by our transcribers to save you more time. By using our tool, transcription can be done faster and cheaper than other transcription agencies.”
Transcribing can be a chore: it’s time consuming, fiddly and – let’s face it – boring. Amberscript’s unique SaaS software lets users automatically transform audio into text – all by simply dropping an audio or video file into the Amberscript editor.
Amberscript has now developed its own ‘engine’: the motor that ensures that Dutch audio is translated into Dutch text. Peter-Paul de Leeuw (Amberscript’s CEO) explains that work on the engine is in full swing, but his own product should already translate 80 to 90 percent well, depending on the audio quality.
Seeing is believing, so we took the test. An interview without microphones (the use of microphones is recommended) with complicated technical terms still produces quite a few errors. It’s different with a clearly spoken piece of text into a microphone. Here, Amberscript does an amazing job. A piece of sample text of about a hundred words on artificial intelligence is translated almost flawlessly. Only the term “master-slave relationship” from philosopher Hegel presents difficulties. That becomes “most slave relationship. Not crazy, but it doesn’t add up. In the small test, Apple’s Siri and Google Docs make the exact same mistake. The two superpowers otherwise make a mess of things. Of course: unlike Amberscript, they are free programs (for example, Apple includes the option in the Notes app; Google includes it on desktops in the Chrome version of Docs), but the difference is striking.
Take a sentence like, “artificial intelligence will soon imitate much of what humans do, both in the physical and intellectual realms. Google Docs brews this from it: ‘the artificial intelligence will soon bravely imitate much of what hatted and it does so on the physical as well as the intellectual plane.’ And Siri? That one keeps it too: ‘artificial English genesis will do profile sole imitate of that human does so on the physical as well as on the intellectual plane.’ And from Marx and Buber, Siri stupidly makes ‘Max de Boer’. You can do better than that, Siri.
De Leeuw is also far from satisfied with his own software, but already it offers significant time savings for people who need to transcribe speech, such as journalists, students, doctors, or court employees. Amberscript initially focuses on the transcription of interviews. Indeed, the software neatly distinguishes between the interviewer and interviewee. As more training material for the engine becomes available, the machinery should improve. With each improvement made by users, it will.
AMSTERDAM – During his studies, Peter-Paul de Leeuw experienced how frustrating it is to transcribe spoken recordings manually. For English conversations, good software was available that automatically converted speech to text. Not so for the smaller European languages. De Leeuw decided to do it himself.
The result is the transcription service Amberscript. At the end of last year, the service came out on top in a test by journalists’ magazine VillaMedia of five apps that convert Dutch spoken text into the written word. However, the service is not 100% accurate yet.
“With professional audio recordings, it goes up to about 95%,” says De Leeuw. “But recordings via a smartphone in a noisy café are almost useless.” He hopes to overcome the latter by allowing customers to use a microphone. “We’re working on a test right now.”
If you want to type out an hour-long interview, it will take at least four hours. With our web app, a Dutch conversation is converted into text in about 10 minutes. This can then be corrected by the user, or by us.
