Creators can now reach a global audience with captions and subtitles

Rev, the world’s most accurate speech-to-text platform, announced its partnership with Vimeo, the leading all-in-one video solution, to be its caption and global subtitle provider. This is a landmark integration that will automatically create accessible, searchable videos for all users, and allow them to meet compliance standards right from within the Vimeo hub. Pairing powerful AI with human expertise, Rev has pioneered the reduction of bias in AI across languages, dialects and genders. This universal accuracy makes Rev the right partner to expand Vimeo’s reach to a diverse, global audience.

The partnership comes at a critical time when video is booming and captions are the new norm. With nearly 1 in 20 U.S. adults having some level of difficulty hearing, captions are not only crucial for accessibility, but equally necessary to meet the demands of the changing viewer. In a recent study, more than 70 percent of Gen Z and half of Millennials reported using subtitles frequently. The rules have changed: People no longer watch videos without captions, they just keep scrolling. 

“Vimeo has redefined storytelling, making it easy for anyone to tell great stories,” said Jason Chicola, CEO, Rev. “With Rev, those stories can reach the world. We are committed to delivering the most accurate captions in every language, advancing our mission to understand the human voice.”

Investing in unbiased technology that represents all voices accurately is a priority for Vimeo with its global audience of nearly 300 million users. Unlike any other speech engine, Rev has spent a decade training its model on millions of hours of diverse, real-world data. Combined with thousands of human transcriptionists who in real-time edit the model’s output for near-perfect accuracy, Rev has proactively reduced bias for gender, ethnicity, languages and backgrounds. The result is unmatched accuracy across a spectrum of voices, empowering Vimeo’s creators to reach a limitless audience, and meet ADA and FCC video compliance standards.

“We’ve built the leading platform for elevating human expression,” said Ashraf Alkarmi, CPO at Vimeo, 2023 Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Company. “We continue to advance this mission by providing a seamless experience for storytellers to create meaningful videos that drive engagement and connection. As we continue to enhance our product for a global audience, partners that uphold standards as Rev does with unbiased accuracy are pivotal to us surpassing what’s possible for Vimeo.” 

Rev is powering auto-captions for Vimeo’s half-million VOD and live videos daily, an integration that will automatically create accessible, searchable videos. To achieve compliance, users can upgrade to 99% accurate videos, or add global subtitles in 17+ languages without ever leaving Vimeo. Additionally, Rev users can upload captioned videos directly to Vimeo, its video platform of choice. This seamless experience exceeds creator demands for quality and speed, delivering human-edited captions within 24 hours and automatic captions in minutes.

New Connectors Expand Qlik’s AI, Machine Learning and NLP Capabilities, Augmenting Cloud Analytics and Application Automation Efforts with Rich Third-Party Content

Qlik^® today introduced a suite of OpenAI connectors that will help customers seamlessly and securely bring Generative AI content into Qlik to support a wide range of cloud analytics and automation use cases. Expanding Qlik’s robust set of native Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, Qlik’s OpenAI connectors deliver the power of Generative AI directly within Qlik, bringing back rich contextual content through a ChatGPT experience to enhance data and insights in Qlik applications and automations.

“Generative AI is a transformative evolution in the market, and customers are rightly excited about its potential to augment their analysis and processes with relevant external data,” said James Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer at Qlik. “Our new OpenAI connectors build on our long history of enabling customers with AI, ML and NLP capabilities directly within Qlik. These connectors are just the first elements in our longer-term strategy to help organizations both enhance their full range of data and analytics capabilities with Generative AI, as well as support their own Generative AI initiatives with our market-leading portfolio of data integration, quality and governance solutions.”

Qlik recently showcased the potential of combining Generative AI and Qlik with a demonstration at QlikWorld that used ChatGPT to drive insights within Qlik Cloud^®. The session showed how Generative AI can complement a wide range of use cases, from adding external data sets to analysis, expanding context with natural language readouts, and asking questions that deliver new insights from data.

“Today, organizations are actively using predictive and classic AI and accelerating their experimentation with Generative AI across use cases, including those in data analytics and decision support and automation,” said Dan Vesset, group VP of data and analytics research at IDC. “Qlik’s new OpenAI connectors will provide organizations with tools to augment the ongoing work of their analysts and developers, while enabling organizations to establish necessary controls and governance to fully leverage this latest technology.”

The general availability of Qlik’s OpenAI connectors is the first in a planned set of services and solutions that will leverage Qlik’s open platform approach to help customers and partners innovate and drive more use of and value from their data with Generative AI. The suite of OpenAI connectors includes:

• Qlik OpenAI Analytics Connector – Enables real-time access to generative content within Qlik Sense apps. Users can securely integrate powerful natural language insights directly from OpenAI into analytics apps, synthesize and combine third-party data into existing data models, directly ask questions of ChatGPT augmented with data from Qlik, and much more. Qlik‘s analytics engine sends subsets of data to OpenAI in real-time for insights and answers in-context as users make selections.
• Qlik OpenAI Connector for Application Automation – Helps developers enhance their existing workflows with AI and large language model-generated content when creating expressions, commands or scripts. Qlik developers can leverage OpenAI to help quickly and efficiently create and deliver additional value to use cases such as sentiment analysis for CRM applications and customer service teams, translating reviews or product material into different languages, or summarizing complex external text for internal audiences to supplement market trend analysis.

Powerful New Features Extend Cloudinary’s AI-powered Platform, Allowing Creative and Technical Teams to Innovate Faster and Deliver Customized Images and Video with Greater Ease

Cloudinary, the image and video platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, today announced the availability of several new generative AI, large language models (LLM) and GPT-based features within its Programmable Media image and video APIs including Generative Fill, Generative Remove, Generative Replace, AI-powered Image Captioning, and a ChatGPT-backed natural language interface. The new Cloudinary features, available now, allow users to create customized, personalized assets in seconds and help technical teams scale quickly by intelligently automating workflows and eliminating repetitive and time-consuming image manipulation tasks. Learn more about these new features in today’s blog posts here and here.

Advanced creative work is time-consuming, expensive and, for some brands, simply out of reach. More than 10,000 customers and 1.5 million users have long benefited from the power of AI via Cloudinary’s award-winning image and video APIs. Today’s new generative AI capabilities extend these benefits even further by making what was once impossible, possible and more accessible for users to create, edit and deliver dynamic visual experiences at unprecedented scale. For example, instead of re-shooting an entire campaign, developers and digital marketers can remove unwanted objects and create beautiful images at scale through Cloudinary’s APIs. Likewise, AI-powered image captioning produces intelligent captions for images instantly to improve accessibility, asset searchability and SEO while boosting productivity and reducing production time.

“Generative AI has completely transformed the way we work, and the most recent advancements are just scratching the surface of what’s possible,” said Nadav Soferman, co-founder and chief product officer, Cloudinary. “Our founding mission was to revolutionize the way in which brands manage and deliver images and video at scale, and building solutions that harness the most advanced technologies has been central to delivering on that promise.”

Soferman continued, “Since launching our flagship image management product, which utilized AI for face-detection-based cropping, we’ve led advancements across media management, leveraging the power of AI, machine and deep learning, and raising the bar for what’s possible in media creation and delivery. It’s always been about letting advanced technology streamline or eliminate tedious tasks so brands can focus their limited resources on creating high impact, highly visual sites, apps and campaigns that connect, engage, inspire and convert. We are very excited to make these powerful new generative AI capabilities a reality for the technical and non-technical teams committed to bringing their best visual stories to life – and we’re just getting started.”

New features bring ease and automation to visual media workflows

• Generative Fill: Enables users to enhance and expand an image with ease. For example, users can intelligently expand and extend an original image, especially useful when needing to transform an image from vertical to horizontal. With generative fill, the new AI-generated background will blend seamlessly with the original image.
• Generative Remove: Via natural language prompts, users can remove unwanted elements from images and automatically add a matching background. The new feature uses state-of-the-art technology such as open-set object detection models and powerful AI capabilities through Stable Diffusion.
• Generative Replace: Allows users to easily detect, change and replace unwanted elements and colors all via natural-language prompts. This capability is especially useful for users looking to more easily create color-based variations of products or to improve web accessibility for those with color blindness.
• AI-powered Image Captioning: Intelligently creates image captions for galleries, user-generated content and product descriptions at scale. Image-to-text features strengthen image SEO, improve accessibility, and automate image classification for better findability. It also helps e-commerce users save time by automatically creating smart product descriptions.
• Conversational Transformations Builder: This intuitive feature provides a natural language interface through ChatGPT, allowing users to effortlessly communicate desired image transformations and optimizations. For example, a simple command such as “please blur this image and crop to a 1:1 aspect ratio” would deliver a complete and correct transformation.

AI at its core from the start

Cloudinary has a long history of delivering powerful AI capabilities to its customers via trusted industry-leading AI technologies such as OpenAI, Google Vision, and Amazon Rekognition, as well as its own domain expertise and content-aware machine learning models including those for background removal, smart image tagging, video cropping and domain-specific models for industries such as fashion and furniture. For more than a decade, Cloudinary’s image and video solutions have leveraged AI and ML, offering the most advanced image and video transformations including face detection, contextual cropping and auto-tagging, and now generative AI capabilities and ChatGPT integrations for intelligent image captioning. With Cloudinary Assets, digital asset management is effortless through UI-based auto-tagging, AI-powered visual search, and content moderation, enabling seamless workflows for user-generated content. What’s more, the Cloudinary Assets Studio feature harnesses generative AI power to make editing bulk assets simple and powerful.

Through a strategic expansion of their relationship, Accenture and Google Cloud will help organizations reinvent their businesses with generative AI to unlock new growth opportunities, supported by substantial new investments by Accenture.

Today’s expansion builds on Accenture’s recently announced $3 billion investment in AI. Together, Accenture and Google Cloud will help organizations use generative AI to create new opportunities to drive next-level innovation, optimization and reinvention. Building on the combination of capabilities and talent within the Accenture Google Business Group and Google Cloud’s leading AI products (including Vertex AI, Generative AI App Builder and more), the companies will guide organizations on the optimal use of generative AI to address specific business needs securely, responsibly, and at scale.

“Generative AI is already transforming how people work and access information and will dramatically amplify what humans can achieve,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “Our expanded partnership with Google Cloud will help our clients across industries responsibly accelerate adoption of generative AI throughout their enterprises to maximize efficiency, drive competitive advantage, and reach new levels of performance.”

“Generative AI has the ability to help businesses fundamentally improve how they operate, whether it is optimizing supply chains to be more sustainable or mitigating cybersecurity threats based on information from billions of security events,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “Together with Accenture, we will provide businesses with the advanced technology and expertise they need to help transform their organizations and realize value from their generative AI deployments.”

Under the expanded partnership, the companies will co-develop new solutions leveraging Accenture’s industry and functional experience and Google Cloud’s suite of generative AI technologies. The companies will focus on improving business processes across 19 industries and six business functions, with a strategic focus on sales and marketing, supply chain, healthcare, retail and consumer packaged goods, financial services, sustainability, security, and operational services. Examples include:

• Tailored marketing and customer experiences: The two companies will use generative AI to help businesses create hyper-personalized advertisements and digital content, deliver customized dynamic pricing, and reinvent their interactions with their end consumers.
• Supply chain optimization: Accenture and Google Cloud will use generative AI to help customers predict optimal inventory levels to minimize storage costs, improve shipping routes to reduce gas consumption, and anticipate delivery dates and delays to increase customer satisfaction. Additionally, Accenture will expand the supply chain functionality in its retail solution, which is now using Google Cloud’s large language models (LLMs) to help businesses optimize their customer, workforce, and storefront experiences.
• Healthcare process improvement: Accenture will use a variety of Google’s LLMs, tuned to health care, to develop solutions to help improve operational efficiency, caregiver support, patient engagement, and research and development. Accenture is also addressing critical healthcare challenges with Google Cloud’s technologies and using the AI-enabled Claims Acceleration Suite to streamline health insurance and prior authorization claims processing by transforming data, enabling clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions.
• Security risk mitigation: The Accenture Adaptive Detection and Response Service was the first to use Google Cloud’s specialized security LLM, Sec-PaLM, which is trained on billions of cybersecurity data signals and helps customers protect critical assets and stay ahead of cyber threats. The service also includes Google Cloud’s Chronicle Security Operations technology, enabling businesses to mitigate cybersecurity incidents in real-time, such as malware, phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and trends that may indicate a security breach.
• Software code generation: Accenture is working with Google Cloud's Foundational Model for code, Codey, to complement Accenture’s existing software engineering capabilities. Codey helps accelerate software development for code generation, code chat, and code completion.

To further extend its cybersecurity position, Lendlease, a global real estate group with core expertise in shaping cities and creating thriving communities, is using Accenture’s Adaptive Detection and Response service, built on Google Cloud technologies, to increase agility and allow it to simplify its security operations through greater transparency, flexibility and scale.

“Having next-generation cybersecurity detection and response capabilities is critical for Lendlease to create connected communities and deliver workplaces of the future around the world,” said William Ruh, CEO, Lendlease Digital. “The Google Cloud generative AI technology within the Accenture service will allow us to optimize our security operations and infuse cyber resilience into the core of our business.”

As part of the expanded partnership, a dedicated team of generative AI engineering experts from both companies will be aligned to Accenture Innovation Hubs in key locations around the world, including Bangalore, Dubai, Dublin, London, Melbourne, Milan, Munich, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, and Sydney. Leveraging the Accenture Center for Advanced AI, the hubs will host rapid experimentation and prototyping sessions to help clients unlock value from generative AI in days, rather than weeks or months.

Accenture and Google Cloud are investing in a new integrated training curriculum to accelerate generative AI expertise within Accenture, scaling the resources available to businesses on their digital transformation journeys. The companies are also launching a joint AI Ambassador certification program that will provide specialized training in LLMs and building disruptive solutions. Accenture and Google Cloud's responsible AI practices will be at the core of this collaboration to help address bias, data protection and appropriate data use in order to create a foundation for trust.

Beyond the partnership, Accenture is also using Google Cloud in its own enterprise architecture to enable its data-driven business. Accenture’s global IT organization partnered with Google Cloud to deploy a modern data platform for faster, more secure and scalable capabilities positioning Accenture for generative AI expansion.

Databricks customers will now be able to get started with Alation directly from their Databricks workspace

Alation, the data intelligence company, today announced that Alation is now available through Databricks Partner Connect.

Today’s data landscapes are complex and highly heterogeneous, with a mix of cloud, on-premises, and legacy systems. As a result, it can be difficult to find the correct data set to use and to know whether that data is accurate. As data-driven decision-making becomes central to every team and business function, and as data volumes and data types have increased, access to trusted data has become a strategic concern.

Organizations leverage the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics, and AI. With Alation, data science, data analytics, and AI teams can easily find, understand, and trust their data across both Databricks and non-Databricks data stores. This is accomplished by extending the data discovery, governance, and catalog capabilities built into Databricks and Unity Catalog across other enterprise data sources. With Alation and Databricks’ expanded partnership, customers can now scale data access for lakehouse adoption, discover and migrate high-value data, and with integration with Databricks Unity Catalog, govern and catalog metadata across multiple workspaces. This enables customers to answer bigger, more impactful questions with their data than ever before.

"Alation is crucial to making data a trusted asset throughout the organization," said Raghu Jayachandran, Senior Manager of Enterprise Data at RaceTrac. "We use it to enable evidence-based analytics and more strategic business decisions. And it's critical to smarter cloud usage; we gain valuable insights about our data, which help us maintain a cloud environment, provide access to everyone, and foster a data-driven culture. This means we have a clear understanding of which data to migrate, and our data teams can easily find and understand high-quality data within the Databricks Lakehouse with detailed contextual metadata. This improved visibility empowers our teams to enhance analytical models and make confident, data-driven decisions."

“Enterprises seeking a modern data infrastructure adopt cloud environments in hopes of being data-driven and accelerating digital transformation,” said Diby Malakar, VP of Product Management, Alation. “But knowing what data to migrate and ensuring everyone in the organization can self-service trusted data in the data lake is challenging. Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform provides visibility into an organization’s data by centralizing the knowledge associated with data: descriptions, policies, origin, and other crucial context. This knowledge powers a single search and discovery interface that informs what data is critical to migrate to Databricks and then enables everyone to find trusted data independently.”

“Organizations need full visibility into all of their data to empower everyone across the business to understand the context of the data being used and to build a data culture,” said Chris Hecht, SVP, Corporate Development and Product Partnerships at Databricks. “Our deepened integration with Alation improves trust and provisions a single view of customers’ data. This enables faster migration, provides visibility, fosters collaboration across data teams to ensure frictionless lakehouse adoption, and facilitates self-service analytics. As a result, data engineers and data scientists can reinforce the value of data as a product across their organizations.”

Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform provides a single view of all an organization’s Databricks workspaces and combines that with the rest of their data. This helps identify the most valuable data to migrate to Databricks and empowers all data consumers to better leverage the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

Alation for Databricks enables organizations to:

• Provide visibility and trust during migration: Eliminate the uncertainty in data migration by providing visibility to the migration process, prioritizing the most used data, and guiding users to new data in Databricks.
• Facilitate collaboration and build a data culture: Add context and searchable conversations to the cloud data lake to deliver faster and more accurate data science insights, and know which assets can be shared with the entire organization to build a data culture.
• Ensure data integrity throughout its lifecycle: Capture the exact flow of your data over time through lineage. Know where Lakehouse data is, where it came from, and where it’s going.

Ranker Insights segments include detailed understanding of audiences within the major premium services including Netflix, Apple +, Hulu, Prime, Disney +, Max and more

BDEX and Ranker have begun in-market testing for a partnership that for the first time will allow Ranker Insights data to be distributed to major DSPs including The Trade Desk, MediaMath and Simpli.fi. among others. This newly minted pairing will give marketers and their agencies access to often hard-to-reach fans of original series only available on specific subscription streaming platforms including Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+, Prime and more.

Ranker Insights provides data from over 30 million TV, film and pop culture enthusiasts who visit Ranker monthly, including granular data about consumers of shows from all major OTT services and networks, a library of over 10,000 titles. Ranker Insights is the only comprehensive source of title-to-title audience affinities for targeting audiences behind the walled gardens of the major streaming platforms. 

Unlike other data providers, Ranker segments are based on the proactive engagement of true TV fans expressing their preference across their votes and other actions on Ranker and the affiliated Watchworthy TV recommendation app. Ranker Insights data allows for the targeting of fans who took the time to vote on Ranker content about the shows they have watched. This formula has proven to yield better conversion tune-ins and overall engagement than more generic data sources, including viewership and contextual sources.

Over the next several months, Ranker and BDEX will make available a variety of segments ranging in specificity. Broad based genre and thematic segments will balance reach and performance by leveraging correlations data that assists in grouping fans of similar shows based on shared positive sentiment among viewers. Ranker's unique ability to build hyper-targeted audiences using the show-level viewing preferences of consumers, including the ability to provide data on hard-to-reach original series content from all streaming platforms, will be on full display. This can carry across multiple content areas from Returning Series such as “The Crown” or “The Morning Show,” to well known Franchises ranging from “The Witcher'' to “Game of Thrones” to “The Rings of Power.” Ranker data can also be used to target fans of specific Genres, such as Reality TV: Cooking or fans of Dark Comedy.  

David Yon, SVP and GM of Ranker Insights, added, “Ranker Insights provides an exclusive set of data based on the proactive sentiments of our visitors. Our scope can vary from broad to very narrow depending on the campaign. Additionally, our data is the perfect complement when there is a need to target fans of specific shows only available on streaming platforms.” 

Ranker Insights allows brands to extend the reach of their campaigns and target unexpected audiences with strong affinities. Ranker Insights data can be used as a standalone service or as a complement to other data sources. BDEX and Ranker Insights will give marketers and advertisers the ability to access these audience offerings on a marketplace for the first time. 

David Finkelstein Co-Founder and CEO of BDEX, stated, “By incorporating new segments of Ranker Insights’ data into our taxonomy of data segments, we hope to help programmatic advertisers better target their audiences of interest and improve their return on ad spend. As we continue to roll out new segments of audiences for a variety of genres and themes, customers will be able to get as specific or broad as needed in their campaign targeting. Ranker is also one of the first of our partners to leverage new enhancements to our identity graph that is proving to result in even greater performing audiences.”

Audacy’s 250+ Local Radio Station Streams and Complete Podcast Library Now Available on Hundreds of Additional Home, Car, and Portable Connected Devices via TuneIn, Unlocking New Monetization and Reach

Audacy will extend digital distribution of its 250+ stations and entire podcast library to TuneIn, a leading live streaming service providing hundreds of home, car and portable device integrations. The partnership bolsters the reach of Audacy’s premium live local music, news and sports content, as well as its award-winning collection of podcast titles, by expanding availability to over 200 additional platforms and connected vehicles and devices, including Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Bose, Samsung and Xbox, as well as on the TuneIn mobile app and TuneIn.com.

TuneIn users will now have access to Audacy brands like WFAN, America’s No. 1 sports radio station, 1010 WINS, the most-listened-to news radio station in the country, the world-famous KROQ and thousands of titles from award-winning podcast studios Cadence13, Pineapple Street Studios and 2400Sports. The agreement will also give Audacy access to TuneIn’s advertising supply and bring select TuneIn original content to the Audacy digital platform.

“Streaming of AM/FM Radio is one of the fastest growing segments of all digital audio today. As consumer demand for Audacy’s best-in-class local audio content continues to increase, we’re committed to meeting the listener wherever they wish to consume, and we’re delighted to expand the availability of our unique live sports, news, and personality-driven audio content to over 200 new TuneIn-supported platforms,” said J.D. Crowley, Chief Digital Officer and President of Podcast and Streaming, Audacy. “We’re equally thrilled to welcome TuneIn’s premium exclusive content to the Audacy digital platform.”

“We’re very pleased that Audacy has selected TuneIn to extend its digital reach and monetization capabilities,” said Rich Stern, Chief Executive Officer, TuneIn. “Audacy and TuneIn together bring consumers the nation’s most coveted Audio talent, including Garth Brooks, Tom Hanks, Boomer Esiason, Katie Neal and Bru, podcasts like “Fly on the Wall” with Dana Carvey and David Spade, Amy Poehler’s “Say More with Dr. Sheila” and “HBO’s Succession Podcast.”

The partnership also unlocks new monetization opportunities for Audacy and TuneIn’s advertising partners, leveraging the companies’ collective scale, precision targeting and analytics capabilities.