AI Transcription Startup Preserving Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies

An Israeli startup that uses AI to generate highly accurate transcripts and captions is working to preserve the testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust.

Verbit says it is using a collection of “relevant and specific terms” relating to the Holocaust and the recollections of survivors to train its Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) platform.

According to the company, this gives more accurate results, in particular when recording survivors who speak a range of languages in a variety of accents.

The Givatayim-based startup is partnered on the project with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (commonly known as the Claims Conference), the representative of world Jewry in negotiations on restitution for the victims of the Nazis.

The Claims Conference, which is also dedicated to education about the history of the Holocaust and its survivors, asked Verbit to help with its goal of transcribing 8 million minutes of testimonies. So far, there are more than 400,000 minutes of publicly available and searchable transcribed testimonies. Many of the recordings were of low quality, requiring Verbit to develop new technology to preserve them.

As part of the project, Verbit has also transcribed 150,000 minutes of archives from Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, which are now part of the National Library of Israel.

“It is of utmost importance to document history in order to make such events accessible in Israel and around the world, in order to ensure that they do not recur,” said Verbit CEO Yair Amsterdam.

“For the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, we developed a new background noise cleaning technology that made it possible to renew decades-old recordings,” he said.

“The ultimate goal is to transcribe some eight million minutes of documented testimonies in many languages that will enable Holocaust commemoration among future generations as well. Such a project is accompanied by a sense of national mission and heritage of the people of Israel.”