Following an extensive trial period, the Parliament of Finland has adopted an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to facilitate the official reporting of its plenary sessions and public committee hearings.
The trial began in 2019, evaluating the needs of the records office and assessing the usability of ASR in both Finnish and Finland’s other official language, Finland Swedish. Weighed against these challenges, parliamentary reporters saw the potential of ASR to reduce the need for physical typing at the drafting stage of reports and to bring much needed flexibility to the resourcing of their work.
As understanding grew of how ASR technology could be applied to parliamentary reporting, the office developed a detailed picture of user experience as well as the relative word error rates of the different systems under consideration. Following competitive tendering, the chosen system was finally put into use at the start of 2022. The records office is now busy tailoring the service to the specific needs of the parliamentary reporters.
Finnish parliamentary reporters will give a presentation about their new ASR system during the next Intersteno Congress in Maastricht from 6-11 August 2022.
