Speech recognition tech company Inscripta: “R&D is easier and faster with a supercomputer”
Inscripta is a Finnish speech recognition company whose mission is to help healthcare professionals speed up their work. With the help of CSC’s Puhti supercomputer and Business Finland’s compute grant, Inscripta has developed the most accurate speech recognition technology on the market.
Part of the daily routine work of healthcare professionals is keeping patient records. Inscripta, a Helsinki-based company founded in 2016, has developed a dictation application, based on AI-powered speech recognition technology. Inscripta’s solution significantly speeds up the work of healthcare professionals, enabling them to treat more patients, for example.
“According to our recent survey, the app saves users an average of 45 minutes a day. Our solution has an impact on both users’ work days and society at large as it’s saving healthcare resources,” says Peter Smit, CEO at Inscripta.
European markets in sight
The accuracy of Inscripta’s speech recognition technology, developed in Finland, is over 98%. The technology is the most accurate on the market and is approaching the human level. The user reads and checks the text they dictate, but it is only rarely necessary to make corrections.
The solution is widely used in Finnish welbeing services counties and private healthcare providers. Users are healthcare professionals, from nurses to physicians and therapists.
“Our users like the app because it’s easy to deploy, simple to use, and the text that comes from dictation is of high quality,” says Emre Cakir, Senior Speech Recognition Engineer at Inscripta.
Inscripta is making plans for other European markets as well. The technology can be taught to understand any language, dialect, or jargon. It is also suitable for other industries.
“We already have a ready-made healthcare solution in Swedish and a demo in nearly ten European languages. International expansion is a big goal for us,” Smit says.
High-performance computing as a catalyst for R&D
Inscripta’s technology is a product of years of work in training and experimenting with AI algorithms to find the best possible speech recognition models. Training AI models requires a huge amount of data and a lot of compute power.
Inscripta was one of the first Finnish companies to seek and receive R&D computing grant from Business Finland, allowing them the access to CSC’s Puhti supercomputer free of charge as early as in 2020.
“CSC’s high-performance computing environment is ideal for companies in the R&D phase that run large amounts of data and require a lot of compute power. In our experience, R&D is much easier in the CSC HPC environment than in commercial cloud services,” Smit says.
Speed, capacity and user support main benefits of CSC’s environment
According to Smit and Cakir, the number one advantage of HPC computing is speed, enabling efficient training of AI models. In the CSC environment, computing capacity and GPUs have been well available.
“Also, the user support is great. CSC’s documentation is good, and if I can’t find the answer to the problem, I can contact the service desk for support,” Cakir says.
Cakir also brings up the importance of the familiar environment. Inscriptans got used to working in CSC’s HPC environment already during their studies: Smit at Aalto University’s speech recognition research group and Cakir at Tampere University.
“CSC’s environments are widely used in universities, and it was easy to start to use the familiar, reliable environment as a business user”.
LUMI’s computing resources an advantage for Finnish companies
The LUMI supercomputer is a joint investment by ten European countries and the EU’s EuroHPC joint venture, located at the CSC data center in Kajaani. LUMI is one of the fastest supercomputers and most advanced AI platforms in the world. 20% of LUMI’s capacity in Finland is reserved for RDI work by Finnish companies.
So far, Inscripta has been working with CSC’s Puhti supercomputer but is considering to start using LUMI’s resources.
“I can certainly see CSC and LUMI as one of our main platforms as we expand our R&D work in the future,” Smit says.
“It is great that companies in Finland have access to such computing resources. The fact that the resources are run by a company owned by the Finnish state and higher education institutions is also important from a data trust and security standpoint,” Cakir adds.
More information about business use of the LUMI supercomputer:
Dan Still
Dan Still works with building industrial partnerships and networks to boost industrial HPC use.