Giving Compass' Take:

• Microsoft and Amazon both created new transcription technology for deaf and hearing-impaired college students so they can easily record lectures. 

• How are corporate and educational partnerships mutually beneficially?

• Read about Amazon's partnership with Edhesive to offer computer science courses. 

On the heels of one another, two tech titans recently announced higher-education partnerships that leverage transcription technology to make educational materials more accessible to a broader swath of learners.

Microsoft announced a partnership with the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Via Microsoft Translator, a translation service, students in classes and lectures can get automated transcriptions on their mobile and desktop devices.

This is Microsoft’s first large-scale deployment of this technology to a higher-ed institution, says Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow who oversees Microsoft’s work in speech, natural language and machine translation. Nine classes at the university are currently piloting Microsoft Translator, according to Brian Trager, the associate director for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf’s Center on Access Technology.

Amazon followed with an announcement of its own on Monday. The e-commerce giant announced that Amazon Transcribe, a service that converts audio from speech to text is partnering with Echo360, a video-platform for higher education institutions, to provide automated captioning of lectures that will be displayed side-by-side along the video. Students will be able to download the transcripts and reference them later.

“It’s going to improve the level of engagement, which is what correlates directly to better grades,” claims Echo360 CEO and founder Fred Singer.

Both Echo360’s Singer and Microsoft’s Huang believe their respective partnerships will help students who are deaf and hard of hearing. These tools could also help educational institutions who have found themselves in legal trouble.

Read the full article about tech companies bring new transcription tools to higher ed by Tina Nazerian at EdSurge