The French Government Selects EXALEAD to Provide Search within Videos

29/03/2010

The French Government's new public web site, Elysee.fr, leverages EXALEAD's multimedia search technology, Voxalead.

Exalead, a global provider of software for information access and search-based applications for the enterprise and the Web, today announced that the French Government has chosen its technology to power search and content retrieval in the new version of its public website: http://www.elysee.fr

In a market first, the French Presidency has entrusted Exalead to implement search within videos using Exalead’s Voxalead technology. This technology automatically transcribes video and audio into text (‘speech-to-text’ transcription), and enables search and navigation within these resources (see voxaleadnews.labs.exalead.com).

Specifically, on Elysee.fr, Voxalead technology allows the user to search video content as they do text content - by entering a word in a text box - and the Exalead engine returns all the videos available on the website in which that word is used, with one-click access to the precise moment in each video when the word is used. (The video search on Elysee.fr is available at: http://www.elysee.fr/president/mediatheque/videos/videotheque.10.html).

All the President's speeches captured on video and broadcast on elysee.fr will therefore be fully accessible using Voxalead, allowing everyone to research presidential speeches according to subjects of interest to them. This implementation of Voxalead thus supports the governmental transparency promised by the French Presidency and requested by users consulted during the redevelopment of Elysee.fr.

Voxalead: An Innovative Product of French Technological Know-How

Developed in Exalead’s innovation laboratory, Voxalead is the fruit of close collaboration between public and private partners:

• The skills and experience of Exalead in semantic search and indexation of content
• The automatic transcription technology of LIMSI (Computer Sciences Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, a research unit of CNRS)
• The expertise of Vecsys Research, a specialist in speech recognition and speech processing

In addition, the implementation of Voxalead on Elysee.fr is the result of collaboration between Exalead and Nexint, the company that developed the new version of the site of the French Presidency.

A World First

The deployment of Voxalead on the new version of Elysee.fr is the first implementation of the project for use by the general public. It is applied to all presidential discourse, regardless of format (speeches, press conferences, etc.).

"We are very proud to implement this new technology on the website of the French Presidency. The new site is a showcase for France and for French innovation," said Francois Bourdoncle, Exalead’s Founder and Director of Strategy. "The confidence shown in our technology is a tribute to the scientists, engineers and researchers who work daily in our public and private laboratories. The use of speech-to-text technology, of which Voxalead is the pioneer, should enable improved information access and traceability. Thus we are delighted to see its first use for the general public applied toward greater democratic transparency."

 

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Über Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, American Greetings and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with a platform, Exalead CloudView™ that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilised data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. The system collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications.

Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company, with offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan and Darmstadt. Readers who wish to gain more information about Exalead can contact (415) 230 3800.