By Stuart Tarrant

Michel Levy-Provençal, Deputy Director of Multimedia Development and Director of the Multimedia Studio at The LAB, FRANCE 24’s Research & Development division, will deliver a session provider speech at 11.30am on the 16th of September, to explain how it is using Exalead’s search technology to make its main TV news offering fully browsable and searchable online, to generate transcripts automatically from audio content and extract relevant video clips for online audiences.

“FRANCE 24’s programmes already generate automatic transcripts in parallel with broadcast. The latest development enables each word pronounced in a broadcast to appear automatically, in near live segments, on thechannel's main online broadband HD video player,”explained Exalead’s UK and Ireland MD, Raymond Bentinck. “Everything from presenters’ commentaries to reporters’ narrative and interviews is subjected to automatic semantic analysis, linking key words, places and names of celebrities or organisations. Relevant clips can then be automatically extracted, and then browsed and searched just like any other web content.”

Developed on the basis of Exalead’s semantic search and search based applications, Vecsys speech recognition and Yacast’s broadcast monitoring, the technology has been showcased since December 2009 at http://france24.demos.voxalead.labs.exalead.com/. The incorporation of searchable text within FRANCE 24’s HD player marks the launch of the technology into mainstream broadcasting.

“This is a real technological first. FRANCE 24 is the first and, so far, the only channel to enable its broadcast content to be extracted and browsed as easily as online text – but others will follow,” emphasised Bentinck. “Speech recognition with semantic analysis and selection of video content has huge potential to allow traditional broadcasters to compete with other media online.“

About the author

Stuart Tarrant is the PR Manager for Exalead.

About Exalead

Founded in 2000 by Search engine pioneers, Exalead® is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead's worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, WorldBank and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Its platform, Exalead CloudView™, uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. CloudView collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in June 2010. Exalead has offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Exalead website: www.exalead.com

Dassault Systèmes website: www.3ds.com

About FRANCE 24

FRANCE 24 (www.france24.com) is the first international news channel that offers a French perspective and sensibility on world events. It broadcasts on a 24/7 basis on three channels, in French, English and Arabic, in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas. FRANCE 24 can be accessed by cable, satellite, ADSL and mobile phone. The website www.france24.com is available in 3 languages (English, French and Arabic).

About Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2010

Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2010 will help business and IT leaders to "Connect for Success", by exploring how portals, content, and collaboration tools and technologies are being used to connect people, markets, processes, and information flows across companies, geographies and communities. This year's Summit will examine two essential perspectives, one that paints the big picture at the strategy level, bringing the trends that matter together in an overall analysis of what's ahead. The other delves into the wide array of specific challenges, from the cloud to social software. For further information on the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2010 taking place on 15-16 September in London, please visit www.europe.gartner.com/pcc. You can also follow the event on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc using #GartnerPCC.