Image
Portrait Mathieu Lienart
von Matthieu Lienart
Cloud Engineer, aus Ostermundigen
zum LinkedIn Profil

Case Study:

Raiffeisen - Speech-to-Text translation POC

Image

The Challenge

Business Challenges

In a multilingual country like Switzerland, language barriers and comprehension issues are a common difficulty in internal meetings, somtimes even requiring the help of translators.

Building on the document translation application we developed, the objective was to create a POC to evaluate the possibility of providing live speech-to-text transcription and translation for internal meetings to increase employee experience across the whole organization. 

Technical Challenges

As meetings need to be translated in real-time, the customer faced many challenges to handle various audio and data streams:

  • Audio has to be streamed to and converted into text by the transcription service.
  • Transcriptions have to be sent to the translation service.
  • Translations have to be streamed back to all participants.
  • Participants’ status also needs to be streamed.
  • The solution must offer 3rd party transcription and translation services.
Image

The Solution

As for the documentation-translation application, the objective was to develop a serverless solution. The web application runs on the side of the video conferencing service used by the participants.

Regarding the POC, we decided to apply a simple approach where each client transcribes its own audio and then sends the text for translation. Even though this approach increases the data flow and latency, it simplifies the management of audio and data streams and was considered acceptable for a POC.

The following picture shows the resulting architecture which was written using Terraform as IaC tool.

application architecture
Image

Tools & Technologies

The Application:

  • The web application is an Angular application hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket and delivered to clients through Amazon CloudFront.
  • Amazon CloudFront leverages AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to restrict access to the customer's public IPs and ensure accessibility from the customer's internal network only.

Meeting Management:

  • Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB are used to schedule and manage the meetings.

Realtime Transcription & Translation:

  • Meeting organizers can select 3rd party transcription and translation service providers for domain-specific transcriptions and translations (e.g. transcription of Swiss-German dialect).
  • Each client application requests a direct streaming connection to Amazon Transcribe from the backend. They also establish a web socket connection to the Websocket API gateway. The same Amazon DynamoDB table used to store meeting schedules is also utilized to trackparticipants' connections and status.
  • Clients who enable their microphones stream their audio directly to Amazon Transcribe and receive the transcription of their audio. They then stream their transcription on the meeting web socket.
  • The backend uses Amazon Translate to translate the transcription streamed by clients over the meeting web socket and streams the translation in 4 languages back to all connected participants. To make the solution more efficient, the backend performs translations and streaming simultaneously.

Application Monitoring:

  • All AWS Lambda functions send application logs and business metrics to Amazon Cloudwatch. Logs can be used for troubleshooting and business metrics to monitor the health of the application.
  • AWS X-Ray tracing is enabled on the AWS Lambda functions to identify potential performance bottlenecks, and troubleshoot requests that resulted in an error.

Security:

  • Users' authentication is done through Amazon Cognito, configured in a separate AWS account and federated with the customer's on-premise Microsoft Active Directory.
  • Data in transit and at rest are encrypted, the Amazon DynamoDB table is encrypted at rest using AWS KMS with Customer Master Keys (CMKs).
  • Each AWS Lambda function is executed with AWS IAM roles and scoped down policies according to least privilege principles.

Governance and Compliance:

  • We useAWS CloudTrail to capture audit logs of all API calls which are made to AWS services in the AWS account.
  • AWS Config is used to monitor and log all infrastructure configuration changes as well as the fulfillment or lack of compliance with established configuration rules.

Deployment Automation:

  • The architecture is written in Terraform and deployed in the customers' environment using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild.
Image

Results & Benefits

Building on the architecture of the document translation and using AWS services enabled us to build a real time translation service. We were able to quickly and easily come up with an architecture and deliver a first version of the POC which we improved through multiple iterations.

Using tools and serverless services provided by AWS offered major benefits. First, the provisioning of infrastructure and application servers is fully outsourced to the cloud provider. Second, we could easily build the first version of the POC by leveraging ready-to-use audio transcription streaming service, translation service, or web socket service. Offloading the complexity of deploying and maintaining such services to the cloud provider, allows us to focus on the customers' business requirements and user experience.

This application is currently deployed in the customer’s AWS environment and runs through a first pilot phase. Open challenges are:

  • Enhancing the transcription by training a custom language model for the customer.
  • Enhancing the data flow between the application client, the transcription and the translation service.
  • Improving backend performance
Image
Image
customer

Raiffeisen

The Raiffeisen Group is the leading Swiss retail bank. The Group is the third largest player in the Swiss banking sector with around 1.96 million cooperative members and 3.6 million clients. The Raiffeisen Group is represented at 820 locations throughout Switzerland. The 219 legally autonomous cooperative Raiffeisen banks are aligned within Raiffeisen Switzerland Cooperative. 

Partner

AWS

As AWS Advanced Consulting and training partner, we support Swiss customers on their way to the cloud. Cloud-native technologies are part of our DNA. Since the company’s foundation (2011), we have been accompanying cloud projects, implementing and developing cloud-based solutions.

Weitere Success Stories

Image

KI für Prüfungen an Universitäten auf neuen Wegen

Entdecke, wie Axians Amanox die Idee des Ökonomen Dr. Christian Mueller in Rekordzeit umgesetzt hat: ein bahnbrechendes Tool, das mithilfe generativer KI Prüfungen im universitären Umfeld erstellt. Lies den ganzen Case und erfahre mehr über die innovativen Lösungen.
zur Referenz
Image

Von der Vision zur Realität mit BOAS Networks

Finde heraus, wie Axians Amanox und BOAS Networks eine voll funktionsfähige BETA-Version einer neuartigen Webapplikation in kürzerster Zeit zur Marktreife gebracht haben.
zur Referenz
Image

Umfassende Cloud-Migration bei den SBB

Die Cloud-Migration von Anwendungen, die für den laufenden Betrieb der Schweizerischen Bundesbahnen eine zentrale Rolle spielen, erfordert sorgfältigste Planung und Umsicht. Finde heraus, wie wir von Axians Amanox bei der nahtlosen Umstellung unterstützen konnten.
zur Referenz
Image

Cloud Migration of Customer Facing Applications Switzerland to AWS

The Swiss insurance company Smile Insurances is moving its applications to the AWS Cloud. This case study shows the challenges and the implemented solution for the customer facing applications in Switzerland.
zur Referenz
Image

Reducing Document Translation Costs with Machine Translation

What if an internal portal could cut part of costs for document translation by using machine translation services for some type of documents, and reduce the cost of others by using a combination of machine translation and human review?
zur Referenz
Image

Mit Nutanix für die Zukunft gerüstet.

Suchst du nach einer leistungsstarken und leicht skalierbaren Infrastruktur? Wir zeigen dir, wie wir dem Pflegezentrum Süssbach zu einer hochmodernen, leistungsstarken und leicht skalierbaren IT-Infrastruktur verhelfen konnten.
zur Referenz
Image

Eigenständige Virtualisierungs-Lösung mit Nutanix

Die Pädagogische Hochschule Bern (PHBern) profitiert dank Nutanix und der Axians Amanox von einer eigenständigen Virtualisierungs-Lösung. Alle Server der Hochschule laufen nun auf Nutanix.
zur Referenz
Image

Automatisierung durch die richtige Backup-Lösung

In unserem Referenz-Video erklären dir Mike Freudiger und Samuel Rothenbühler, wie die Mobiliar ihre Betriebsaufgaben automatisiert hat und die freigewordenen Ressourcen für zusätzliche Projekte einsetzen kann.
zur Referenz
Image

Automatisierung im Übersetzungsprozess

Raiffeisen nutzt die AWS Cloud zur zentralen Steuerung der Übersetzungsprozesse über das Webportal Raiffeisen Translation – umgesetzt in enger Zusammenarbeit zwischen Raiffeisen, Axians Amanox und AWS Professional Services.
zur Referenz
Image

The connectivity problem

In the journey to the Cloud, many companies face the challenge of having to interconnect multiple on-premises workloads with their cloud workloads. Our case study shows you how we solved this challenge with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Transit Gateway that enables organizations to interconnect a large number of Amazon VPDs and on-premises networks.
zur Referenz
Image

Digital Twin Service

Our customer needed to extract the most recent data points from a wide range of live data provider. Those data are continuously acquired through a set of data pipelines. Also the customer wanted that the most recent data points were made available through a HTTP REST API. Our case study shows you how we solved this challenge with a fully serverless AWS solution called “Digital Twin” for our customer SBB Cargo.
zur Referenz
Image

Vereinfachung und Minimierung komplexer IT-Aufgaben

Die Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Plattform ermöglicht es Galliker, sich auf Anwendungen und Services zu konzentrieren, welche den Erfolg der Galliker Transport AG voranbringen. In kurzer Zeit konnte so eine dynamische, hoch performante IT-Umgebung bereitgestellt werden.
zur Referenz
Cloud Lösung für den Kunden SBB Cargo

The silo problem of SBB Cargo

In modern businesses, data is ubiquitous and comes from a wide array of different sources, each of those data are saved into so called «vertical siloes» and those siloes aren’t designed to allow cross-siloes data sharing. Let us show you how we tackled this scenario with the help of AWS Data Services for our long time customer SBB Cargo.
zur Referenz
    sharing is caring
     #knowledgesharing

    Unsere Experten geben ihr Wissen an dich weiter. Informiere dich in unseren Blogs über die neuesten Technologien und Trends. 

    zu den Knowledge Sharing-Artikeln