A London-based startup founded by a veteran war correspondent has been selected as just one of two UK companies to win a share of Google’s €150 million Digital News Innovation (DNI) Fund.
Trint, which specialises in AI-powered speech-to-text transcription, was founded by Emmy award-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, a veteran foreign correspondent and war correspondent.
The company’s transcription technology is already being used by some of the globe’s largest media organisations including The New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post and Associated Press (AP).
It allows media professionals – or anyone else to generate searchable transcripts of audio and video that can be promptly verified and timed, transcribing from
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The funding will be used to take the software multilingual, Trint said in a release, with the €300 million (approx. £267 million) going to the Trint Translation Project (TTP), which adds translation capabilities to the company’s widely-used AI-powered transcription software.
“TTP will dramatically increase the speed with which news organisations (and others) create, tailor and distribute content to a worldwide audience by providing fast and highly accurate translation,” the company said.
Language ‘Last Barrier’ to Truly Open News Distribution
“The news industry may be global in scale, but language remains the last big barrier to a truly open, global distribution of modern news,” said Kofman. “We are excited and humbled that Google DNI Fund, with all of its skills and vast resources, sees the value in the innovation that Trint is building.”
He added: “This support will be crucial in bringing this new service to newsrooms around the world. The Trint Translation Project will enable any organisation to create a single, unified platform to access translation for global distribution of multilingual content, which has huge implications for the way that we share information and news between different nations and peoples.”
Trint was founded after Kofman – who has spent more than three decades as a reporter, foreign correspondent and war correspondent and estimates that he has manually transcribed thousands of hours of interviews, speeches, lectures and news conferences – decided there must be a “transcription relief” out there.
The Google DNI Fund is a partnership between Google and news organisations in Europe tasked with promoting technology and innovation to drive high-quality journalism. Google received more than 800 funding applications in this round, of which 98 were granted, including 30 large grants.
The company charges £13.60 per hour as its basic rate.
