Artificial intelligence in the real world

AI is a technology on the cusp. While nothing actually new in itself, a recent convergence of increased computational power with a mushrooming of large datasets and the refinement of existing understanding of the techniques involved has seen it become an important differentiator in the industry. Following a breakthrough year in 2015 when its use, particularly by Google for image processing and translation, jumped markedly, 2017 has seen it rapidly spread into many different niches. Of all the zeitgeist-friendly products on the showfloor at IBC2017, TVU Networks would have won a buzzword bingo competition with its Smart Captions subtitling software. Since renamed TVU Transcriber, it marries AI routines with voice recognition -- another fecund key technology segment in Amsterdam -- to provide an audio to text transcribing service.