Our Story
Ai-Media was founded in 2003 on the belief that everyone deserves access to information. Providing that access remains our mission to this day – and we have also evolved our business.
Ai-Media now has applications for companies, workplaces, events, education, government and broadcast.
We make our leading captioning and translation technologies available to everyone around the world – across purposes, across industries, across platforms, and across languages.
From Facebook and Amazon to global events and local classes, we offer the full range of solutions. Our captions and transcripts use our own cutting-edge technologies and are available in tiers of cost, accuracy, and in any language you like! All to help you reach your biggest audience.
Since September 2020, Ai-Media is a publicly-listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) with the code AIM (ASX:AIM).
How it all started
Ai-Media’s origins go back to its two co-founders – Alex Jones and Tony Abrahams.
Alex was born deaf, and grew up not having the chance to enjoy the same access as his hearing friends. He became passionate about accessibility.
Later in life, Alex met Tony, another keen advocate for people with disability. Tony, having returned from a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, was looking to make a meaningful impact on the world.
Both sought to end the experience of social, educational and vocational exclusion faced by people with disability. This materialised in the creation of Ai-Media.
2003 – Ai-Media enables access on Pay TV
In 2003, the costs of captioning were too high for the emerging Pay TV industry. The new Pay TV providers were faced with many more channels and smaller audience shares, but were confronted with the same costs to produce an hour of captioning. Because of this, deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Australia could only watch high-quality captioned TV on the five free-to-air channels.
Alex and Tony wanted to find a way to introduce captioning to Australian Pay TV. They saw an opportunity to drastically cut the costs of captioning using innovative methods such as repurposing international captions.
Never losing sight of the community’s best interests, Tony and Alex worked with industry leaders to engage the community, conducting a survey asking whether Australians valued the specific Australian captioning style, or preferred having more captioned programs regardless of captioning style. Of the 1,026 responses, all said that they wanted more captions.
For the next year, into 2004, Ai-Media put their plan into action. Ai-Media’s large-scale captioning endeavour began with Pay TV platform Foxtel. It has now grown to over 300,000 hours a year of content across hundreds of channels across the world.
2006 – Making an impact in education
Access to TV was a huge success, but Alex and Tony knew that to have a meaningful impact on the lives of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The key was to also innovate in the education space. Deaf students were 2.5 times less likely to finish high school, relying on note takers, sign language interpreters and lip reading to gain access to classroom content. Live captioning in the classroom would ensure that deaf students had direct access to educational content in real time.
Historically, live captioning for television was delivered using professionally trained stenographers, who use a special 22 key keyboard to type at speeds of up to 240 words per minute. The problem was that this model wasn’t scalable into education. It takes four years to train a stenographer, and as such, the delivery costs were too high.
New technology presented new solutions. Speech recognition software had improved significantly, aided by leaps in computer processing speeds, and making it possible to deliver live content through respeakers. Respeakers are captioners who listen to live content and simultaneously repeat it into speech recognition software specifically trained to their voice. Ai-Media began researching how to create a scalable solution using respeakers to deliver live captioning at the speed of speech.
2008 – First live test for classroom captions
In 2008, Ai-Media ran the first on-site test of live captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in mainstream classrooms.
Partnering with the NSW Department of Education, we set up a live test at Blackwattle Bay Campus in Sydney, Australia. There, a specific classroom was chosen because it had a large broom cupboard located next door, and it was within this cupboard that our first respeaker tested the delivery of live captions for a deaf student.
Our respeaker listened to the teacher and repeated the dialogue into their computer to create the live captions. The student watched these captions in real time over the school’s wi-fi. The trial was a huge success.
2010 – New Inventors win for Ai-Live live captions
By 2010, Ai-Media had developed a full-featured product to remotely deliver live captioning in real time. This was Ai-Live.
Ai-Live then went on to win its feature episode on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s New Inventors program. This win recognised the enormous potential impact of Ai-Live as a practical, affordable, reliable and scalable solution that allowed deaf and hard-of-hearing students to participate fully in mainstream classrooms.
This impact is now being realised across the world as thousands of organisations and individuals access live captions through Ai-Live.
2014 – Developing captions for people with autism
In 2014, Ai-Media went global, opening our European headquarters in London. In the UK, we met Eileen Hopkins, an expert in the field of autism. We worked with Eileen to develop a style of live captioning suited to a wider range of students, including those with ASD.
Our new Simple Text captions summarised content to make it more accessible by removing language ambiguities, metaphor and unnecessary complexity. This innovation was a success and brought captions into classrooms throughout the UK.
2017 – Partnership with Facebook
Facebook announced Ai-Media’s support for the display of closed captions on Facebook live streams in 2017. This marked a milestone in making videos on Facebook accessible to all members of the community. With the power of streaming captions, we were now able to provide accessibility to more people with live video on Facebook.
Introducing Facebook live captions
This is the Facebook Live feature you’ve been waiting for.
Posted by Ai-Media on Tuesday, June 6, 2017
2019 – Ai-Media launches Scribblr.ai
Scribblr.ai is a captioning and transcription service priced at USD $1 per minute with a two-step content-checking process that ensures 99% accuracy.
Scribblr.ai provides the ideal solution for content creators to develop more engaging and accessible content.2020 – Ai-Media becomes a publicly-listed company on the ASX
Since September 2020, Ai-Media has been a publicly-listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) with the code AIM (ASX:AIM), following a successful initial public offering (IPO).
2021 – Ai-Media launches Smart Lexi and expands product suite
Ai-Media launched its ground-breaking automated captioning solution in March 2021, beginning with its application in live broadcast. Smart Lexi uses artificial intelligence, custom dictionaries and human curation to offer the best ASR solution in the market at the time of launch.
Shortly after the launch of Smart Lexi, Ai-Media announced its acquisition of US market leader EEG Enterprises, and in so doing expanded its product suite to include interactive automated captioning solution Lexi, as well as a suite of hardware and networking products.
Ai-Media became a vertically-integrated global captioning, transcription and translation technology company – meaning we are a truly one-stop shop that offers services for all steps in the captioning process.
