The Danish Parliament
With the new speech recognition system parliamentary reporters can produce edited reports quicker.
Over the last decade the average length of the sittings in the Danish Parliament (Folketing) has increased substantially. This has given the Danish Parliament occasion to look for new ways of producing The Official Report (Hansard) in order to meet demands from MPs and the public for a quick publishing of the report and at the same time fulfil the vision of being an attractive workplace.
Project Background
“We were faced with facts and challenges that made it impossible for us to continue working much longer the way we did with The Official Report”, says Per Anker Hansen, vice president in the Danish Parliament. “We have an ongoing obligation to provide the politicians, the press and the public with The Official Report from the debates in a high level of quality and faster than we are publishing the report to the public today, and therefore we had to look for other ways of working”.
It was the Danish Parliament itself who came up with the idea of having a closer look at speech recognition technology. In cooperation with the Centre for Language Technology at the University of Copenhagen, the Danish Parliament made a field study of the available systems for speech recognition and found that the existing technology proved to have sufficient quality to think of it as an integral part of producing The Official Report.
After a public tender the project to design and implement the solution was won by Sirius IT Government Services in Denmark. The project is developed and delivered together with two Danish companies: Prolog Development Center (PDC) A/S and Max Manus A/S, who have specialized in speech-to-text recognition and are partners with Phillips Speech Recognition Systems – the software that will be used in the solution.
"We want to publish the The Official Report from the debates in the Danish Parliament sooner than the case is today. With the new system, including speech recognition, parliamentary reporters can produce edited reports quicker. We expect that reports of 85 % of the total number of hours of debate will be published on our web site within 2-3 hours after the speech is held. By implementing the speech recognition system we optimize our work flows, and we can provide a better service, especially in relation to the public”, says Per Anker Hansen.
Solution Overview
The solution offered consists of a main user interface for the parliamentary reporters, where the new transcription jobs available are ticking in. Each reporter reserves approximately 10 minutes of the debate and begins working with it. The reporter listens to a digital recording of the speech and then dictates the speech into the speech-to-text system, and the Phillips Speech Magic software converts the spoken language into a Microsoft Word document.
The Working Process
During the sittings in parliament one of the reporters will be monitoring the speakers and feeding the system with notes about the order of the speakers and the presiding presidents and about non-verbal communication etc. The agenda for the sitting and lists of expected speakers will be available in the system.
During the re-speaking process the parliamentary reporters also modify the text slightly in order for it to be more readable as a written text. This means that the normal word order in written language is used and that obvious slips of the tongue are corrected. Up to 20 parliamentary reporters can work in the system at the same time, each with their part of the speeches, and look up the status of other parts.
There is also integration to the Danish Parliament's digital recording system, parliamentary documentary handling system, web site, dictionaries and other works of reference, and to a statistics module for collecting data about the work with the reports.
Sirius IT’s Role
Sirius IT’s role in the project is that of overall customer and contract manager, taking care of project management, interface design and usability for all parts of the system and development of the main user interface. Sirius IT will also develop the integration to the parliament's web site to publish the reports as soon as they are completed. PDC and Max Manus will deliver the Phillips Speech Magic software, train it to the textual context used in parliament and develop the integration to Microsoft Word.
“The Parliament has chosen Sirius IT as the main contractor for the project because of its qualifications with respect to project management and systems' integration. Sirius IT has also shown a very good understanding of the project and the importance of focusing on user-friendliness in the solution”, says Per Anker Hansen.
