In September last year Telkom debuted a new translation tool called izwe.ai, with the intention of using in the local education sector to assist learners and teachers alike when it came to language barriers.

Now izwe.ai is being used in a new sphere, with Telkom Business aiming to making the translation tool available to South African SMEs too.

“Every business needs digital tools to remain competitive and you cannot think about digital without mentioning AI. Through this platform, the aim is to enable several different speech-related services. Currently, we are making available transcription and translation services, but we are also developing more refined services that are more technical as it relates to entity extraction, sentiment analysis and other value-added services,” explains Telkom executive for Data Science, Stefan Steffen, in a press release sent to Hypertext. 

“As part of izwe.ai, Telkom Business has partnered with Cape Town-based data labelling start-up Enlabeler to provide Humans-in-the-Loop, a service that allows customers to access translation and transcription services in the various South African languages at increased levels of accuracy,” the organisation adds.

The company notes that Enlabeler has a network of digital linguists who are connected to the platform to help customers with translations and transcriptions.

“If a business wants higher accuracy than what the machine transcription service can provide, they can select the Humans-in-the Loop service on the izwe.ai website. Businesses simply need to upload data on the platform, and it is distributed to the digital workforce that will then provide human transcription to get the required accuracy levels,” it continues.

Those local SMEs interested in izwe.ai and its capabilities can find out more about the translation platform here.

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