Growing up, Alex Jones was unable to access the same things and media as his friends. Mr Jones was born deaf, spurring a passion for improving accessibility across his life.
He eventually met Tony Abrahams, an advocate for people with disability, and the pair launched Ai-Media in 2003, a New South Wales-based tech company offering captioning, transcription and translation services to companies, workplaces, events, education, government and broadcasts.
Ai-Media has been nominated in the 2022 InnovationAus Awards for Excellence in the Creative Tech category. The winners will be announced at a Black-Tie gala at The Cutaway in Sydney’s Barangaroo district on November 17. You can book your tickets here.
The company has the goal of working with customers of all shapes and sizes to transform the concept of accessibility, including within large enterprise settings. This boils down to a simple idea: that in any meeting room, anyone can simply press a button and have automatic captioning and transcripts appear immediately on screens in front of them.
And the team has continually updated and refined its creative technology in the near-20 years since it was founded.
Ai-Media began trading on the ASX as a public company in 2020, and now uses artificial intelligence in tandem with its human employees to develop its offerings.
The company has global patents for its many products, with 70 per cent of its sales coming from outside of Australia, with sales teams based across all major markets around the world. Ai-Media focuses on both the hardware and software side of the speech-to-text equation.
Thanks to this, the company provides not only captioning, but high-quality secure encoding from any source to any destination, and high-fidelity display to any setting.
From 2013 to 2021 the company collaborated with the University of Melbourne Graduate School of Education to explore and document the impact of live captioning in classrooms in Victorian and NSW and acquired EEG Enterprises early last year.
Ai-Media’s automatic captioning product, Lexi, now delivers over 7 million minutes of captioning per month and is growing at a rate of more than 100 per cent.
The company boasts a wide range of prominent and influential customers across a range of industries and countries.
During the Olympics last year, NBC’s Peacock OTT platform used Ai-Media’s automatic captioning for the first time to provide access to 66 channels throughout the major event.
The firm also landed a three-year agreement with Google which will see it provide captioning, transcription and translation services for all Google employees with live multilingual captioning and translation services during internal meetings and events.
Other customers include Zoom, Microsoft, Discovery, ESPN, Fox and NBC.
This year, the team’s incremental improvements to its technology over the past 13 years led to the integration of its iCap network with Ai-Media’s captioning technology, and the company has already enjoyed significant success from this.
Ai-Media secured federal government R&D grants, Commercialisation Australia funding, Export Market Development Grants and venture capital funding across its life.
Ai-Media is a finalist in the Creative Tech category of the 2022 InnovationAus Awards for Excellence. The Awards dinner will be held at The Cutaway in Sydney on November 17. You can book your tickets here.
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