Overview

SOVO Technologies: a spin-off from CRIM

Founded in Fall 2009, SOVO Technologies introduced STDirect licenses offering an advanced closed-captioning system based on the state-of-the-art speech recognition technology developed by CRIM, an applied research centre in the Information Technologies. SOVO is now a business entity catering to the live closed captioning and off-line closed captioning market.

SOVO serves top Canadian broadcasters and producers including RDS, TVA, CDC, TFO, CPAC and many others. SOVO offers turnkey closed captioning and audiodescription services. More details can be found on the company's web site at www.sovo-tech.com.

The story behind CRIM’s closed captioning activities

CRIM began its research activities in speech recognition in 1985, the year of its foundation. More than twenty years later, CRIM is a major international player in the field. Initially focused on research, CRIM’s speech recognition activities have greatly evolved over the years.

In 2002, R&D projects sought to apply speech recognition technologies to closed captioning for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, marking the beginning of live closed captioning of news and public interest shows for Groupe TVA. This project led to the development of STDirect, which has been used since 2004 on the TVA network.

With the help of CRIM’s prototype, Groupe TVA’s first public broadcasts of news bulletins with French-language closed captioning marked the beginning of an intense development phase in live closed captioning. Today, closed captioning has become a regular service.