A look back at VIVA Tech 2019: humans and technology progress together
A look back at VIVA Tech 2019: humans and technology progress together
As you may know, we attended – along with the Home of Translation –this year’s edition of Viva Technology. We offered live demonstrations of our new technologies and it was a great success. We also discovered the best high-tech international innovations and met a lot of people from different backgrounds, which was particularly interesting. Here is our look back on VIVA Tech 2019 and on how humans and technology can progress together.
The collaboration between Authôt and The Home of Translation makes human and technology progress
Viva Technology – commonly known as “Viva Tech” – is a major annual French high-tech trade show. This year, the event took place as usual at Porte de Versailles, Paris, from May 16 to 18. This worldwide “rendez-vous” attracted 13,000 startups, 1900 investors and 1900 journalists from 125 countries. In addition, 450 prestigious speakers covered numerous topics.
According to LCI, “the VIVA Technology exhibition, which ended on Saturday, the day it is open to the public, confirmed its increasingly important place on the world stage: more than 124,000 visitors walked the aisles of the Porte de Versailles”!
For its 2019 edition, VIVA Tech had decided to add even more room for the event with two halls (1 and 2.2) and the dome of Paris Palais des Sports in order to welcome more visitors. It was a successful bet for this fourth edition. This year again, the show attracted big industry names such as Jack Ma, president of the Chinese group Alibaba, Ginni Rometty (IBM) and Börje Ekholm (Ericsson). Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former sprinter Usain Bolt and chess champion -now Avast ambassador- Garry Kasparov also shared their experiences.
Concerning the innovations themselves, we have selected several interesting cases. First, the Key Infuser robot, which can demonstrate smartphone functionalities, Snatch Studio which verticalizes videos thanks to its artificial intelligence, Nurea which predicts aneurysm ruptures… VIVA Technology 2019 really placed the emphasis on health and accessibility solutions.
The Home of Translation and Authôt were very proud to exhibit alongside such inspirational innovations and people. The Home of Translation welcomed us to their stand on the Thursday afternoon and the Friday morning for a unique demonstration of a live translation and transcription solution.
Over the 3 days of the show, we had about a hundred visits to the stand, from people with different profiles (private corporations, audiovisual production actors, media, schools, students…) interested in subtitling video content, for content translation or interpreting, but also for the live transcription solution.
Live and automatic transcription and translation is indeed a key innovation.
The advantage of human translation with support from technology
Combining professional human translation with our voice recognition technology offers a big advantage for users.
Our live automatic transcription solution based on automatic recognition technology is a perfect match for human skills and expertise such as translation by an interpreter, correction or proofreading.
Also, humans can use our machine translation technology to assist them in their work. For instance, it works well for journalists, psychologists, lawyers and students. It increases their performance, productivity, work quality.
In this way, the machine and the human are at their best and the real focus is on the meaning, not the translation in itself.
Our look back on how humans and technology are progressing
Now that you have a better understanding of the interest and challenges of human translation and automatic translation and transcription – especially for live translations – let’s look at how humans and technology progress and work better together.
We leave the explanation here to the representatives of The Home of Translation and Authôt who were present at the show: Peter and Olivier.
– Peter, you are co-founder of The Home of Translation which has been in existence for more than 10 years now. Why did you want to exhibit at VIVA Tech this year?
For us it was a great opportunity to cement our status as the ‘preferred translator’ of scientific research labs and tech firms in France. We met a number of our clients at the show, as well as a lot of potential new ones.Beyond the purely commercial aspect though, it was a chance for me and my team to get an in-depth insight into the latest advances in artificial intelligence, to which our business has very strong links.
– Olivier, you are co-founder of Authôt, the Parisian start-up that has existed for almost 6 years, and you have never exhibited at VIVA Tech. What made you do it this year?
The trigger was the opportunity to exhibit with our partner The Home of Translation. I find that offering additional services brings real differentiation at a show. The professions of transcription, subtitling and translation are evolving, and Viva Technology was the ideal place to meet a qualified audience!
Peter and Olivier, what is your quick assessment of these 3 days together and in contact with this technology ecosystem?
Peter:
Authot has been a trusted partner for several years now, so it was only natural for the two firms to present a combined offering in the field of voice recognition, and more specifically automatic transcription and subtitling.As a Language Services Provider, we are always very keen to stress the “human” side of our work, but that said, we do use innovative technology more and more in order to offer our clients a faster, better service. Authot has always supported us in this drive, and our joint presence at Viva Tech ensured that we were even more convincing in our discussions with visitors at the show.
Olivier:
We spoke with many people in education and from large groups, coupled with listening to interesting conferences. This allowed us to take a step back from our profession and think about future innovative services to offer.
We were delighted to be part of this event; we discovered a lot and we hope you liked it as well. Live and automatic translation has a bright future ahead.
Authôt. You speak. We write.