Real-time on-board transcription of live audio announcements in trains

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Increasingly more passengers don't capture audio announcements on trains. Passengers might have missed the announcement due to hearing problems, distractions, background noise, ... As a Passenger Information System provider, Televic GSP aims to provide **all** passengers with the latest, most correct information possible. To also include passengers with hearing problems, distracted passengers or non-native speaking passengers, the current research into live audio announcement captioning by Televic GSP provides the auditive public announcements visually on passenger information screens. The off-line, on-board solution transcribes the announcement made by train personnel and visualizes it as real-time subtitles on passenger information screens distributed throughout the railway vehicles. An initial feasibility study was demonstrated in collaboration with TransPennine Express on board the Manchester Airport - Edinburgh train in March 2023\. However, to further improve the accuracy of the real-time subtitling more research is still required.This project researches ways to improve the initial version of the speech-to-text solution to bring the transcription to an acceptable quality for passenger information systems. Current State-of-the-art speech-to-text models near 90% to 95% word accuracy. However, this accuracy is achieved on general spoken text. When transcribing railway public announcements the accuracy drops significantly, specifically for key words such as station names or branding specific words: e.g. Hitchin vs. kitchen; Transport for Whales vs. transport for wales, ... During this research project Televic GSP will research off-line light weight natural language AI models to further improve the transcription accuracy, specifically for key-words such as station names, alerts and branding.Televic GSP specializes in on-board information systems for trains and focusses on two types of communication: passenger information systems and train monitoring, control and safety. The passenger information systems division designs and maintains systems for reliable, real-time and relevant information to passengers. Televic GSP develops vertically integrated solutions that combine hardware, software and services to large train builders and train operating companies. These solutions handle everything from wayside information management down to the passenger and driver communication on the train. Televic GSP has more than 35 years of experience in the rail industry and more than 60 000 vehicles worldwide use on-board passenger information technology from Televic GSP. In the UK this includes train operating companies such as: Transport for Whales, Northern Trains, TransPennine Express Limited, Govia Thameslink Railway, Eurostar, ...