July 2023 Summaries

LeMUR, an API for building Language Model (LLM) applications on spoken data such as meetings and phone calls, has been made available for everyone to use. LeMUR offers a full "AI stack" in a single API, enabling developers to reason over their spoken data with just a few lines of code. The API can summarize meetings, answer questions about call content, generate action items from virtual meetings, and more. LeMUR is designed to be flexible, allowing users to define their own tasks and prompts with a customizable endpoint.

The top five tools for automatically generating subtitles are Otter.ai, Descript, Kapwing, SubtitleBee, and Flixier. These platforms offer various features such as auto-subtitle generation, translations into multiple languages, and the ability to edit fonts, adjust backgrounds and opacity, add animated effects, and more.

The AssemblyAI team has released Conformer-2, a new model for speech recognition. This updated version of the company's original Conformer model is designed to offer improved accuracy and noise robustness. According to the company, Conformer-2 showed a 30.7% relative reduction in mean character error rate (CER) on their newly curated alphanumeric dataset compared to the original Conformer model. In addition, Conformer-2 demonstrated increased noise robustness when tested against added white noise at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The updated model was trained on in-house hardware using a fault-tolerant and highly scalable Slurm scheduler. The launch of Conformer-2 also brings a new speech_threshold API parameter, which allows users to set a threshold for the proportion of speech that must be present in an audio file for it to be processed.