Imperial War Museums (IWM), Capgemini, and Google Cloud have announced a landmark collaboration on the successful AI-powered transcription and translation of more than 20,000 hours from IWM's oral history collection. This transformative project will make invaluable firsthand accounts of 20th-century conflict easily accessible to the public, researchers, and educators globally, using advanced generative AI to transcribe, translate and enable interactive exploration of the archives. This is the first time a UK museum has used AI transcription technology at this scale to create a resource available to users to search, explore, and use sound recordings.
IWM plans to release this new technology to the public via its website later this year. A new platform will complement the recordings and resources already available, where users can search records for more than two million collection items. A significant portion of IWM's oral histories from 1945 to 2000s--com comprising roughly 8,000 interviews with service men and women-- were previously only available as audio files. This made accessing them a time-consuming process.
These recordings, capturing unique experiences of conflict, presented additional challenges including a wide range of expressions from the time they were recorded, specialised military terminology, and varying audio quality. Capgemini, working with Google Cloud, developed an innovative solution that makes these recordings part of IWM's wider oral history collections more accessible. The technology boasts impressive results, with 99% word accuracy and 94% speaker diarisation (partitioning audio according to the identity of the speaker) on transcription tests.
The application allows users to search across interviews using free text, listen to recordings with synchronised transcripts and access AI-generated written summaries through an easy-to-use interface. A "ask a question" function enables users to ask natural language questions about any interview, receiving answers drawn directly from the content, with citations, ensuring accuracy and facilitating a wide range of research needs. IWM plans to expand its AI capabilities in the future, combining AI analysis with human expertise to significantly improve the ability of a broad range of potential users to access and engage with parts of its collection, including researchers, academics and the wider public.
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