Imperial War Museums (IWM), Capgemini, and Google Cloud today announced a significant partnership to successfully transcribe and translate over 20,000 hours of IWM’s oral history collection using AI technology.

This project will provide access to firsthand accounts of 20th-century conflicts for the public, researchers, and educators worldwide, utilising advanced generative AI to transcribe, translate, and facilitate interactive archive exploration.

IWM intends to make this new technology accessible to the public through its website later this year. This platform will enhance existing recordings and resources, enabling users to search through over two million collection items.

Improving access

Many of IWM’s 8,000 oral histories, dating from the 1940s to the 2000s, were only available as audio files, making access time-consuming. They capture unique conflict experiences but pose challenges, such as diverse expressions, military jargon, and varied audio quality.

Capgemini, working with Google Cloud, created an innovative solution to improve access to these recordings within IWM’s broader oral history collections.

The project used a sophisticated pipeline on Google Cloud with Gemini models for transcription and analysis. It extracts metadata, such as names of people, places, and military units, and creates detailed summaries of interviews, highlighting key events and themes.

This process, originally estimated to take about 22 years manually, will now only take a few weeks.

“This project is a big step forward in our mission to broadening access to our vast collections,” says Nick Hodder, director of digital engagement and transformation at Imperial War Museums.

“Our expert curators have been fully involved in this work, ensuring the technology delivers very high levels of accuracy, including understanding and interpreting accents, historical facts and military terminology. This landmark collaboration between IWM, Capgemini and Google Cloud is a significant innovation and a first for a UK museum.”

99% word accuracy

The technology achieves 99% word accuracy and 94% speaker diarisation in transcription tests. It enables users to search across interviews using free text, listen with synchronised transcripts, and access AI-generated summaries via an easy interface. An “ask a question” feature enables users to pose natural language queries about any interview, receiving answers accompanied by citations, thereby ensuring accuracy and supporting research.

“We are incredibly proud to partner with Imperial War Museums and Google Cloud on this culturally significant initiative,” says Steven Webb, UK chief technology and innovation officer at Capgemini.

“This project showcases the profound impact of generative AI in unlocking historical archives and making them accessible in new and engaging ways. It’s a testament to how technology can connect us more deeply with our past to inform our future.”

John Abel, managing director, office of CTO at Google Cloud, adds:

“Google Cloud is committed to empowering organisations like Imperial War Museums with AI tools that can transform how we interact with history. The use of Gemini models to process and understand such a vast and nuanced audio collection demonstrates the sophisticated capabilities of generative AI to overcome complex challenges and deliver meaningful outcomes.”

IWM plans to expand its AI capabilities by combining AI analysis with human expertise, enhancing access for researchers, academics, and the public.

Last month, it was announced that the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC will feature a new gallery powered by AI systems when it opens this autumn. The National Archives’ museum is currently undergoing a $40 million renovation, its first in 20 years, before opening to the public on 23 October.

Meanwhile, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has launched an AI-powered tool called ‘Art Explorer,’ which allows users to collect and compare artworks from the museum’s collection. The new tool enhances the Dutch museum’s 800,000-piece collection, making it more searchable and offering an interactive digital experience.

Cloud project management provider Monday.com Ltd. today unveiled three artificial intelligence-powered updates to its platform, aimed at boosting productivity and helping users build advanced work solutions without requiring technical expertise.

The new additions include monday sidekick, a context-aware AI assistant; monday magic, a quick way for users to instantly build complete functional workflows within the platform; and monday vibe, which is a “vibe” coding platform that allows users to build custom business apps using enterprise-grade security.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Daniel Lereya, chief product and technology officer at Monday.com, described the enhancements as a shift “from work management to work execution,” with a key emphasis on accessibility for nontechnical users.

“AI can actually accelerate our vision,” Lereya said. “It’s not just about putting new tech in place, it’s about giving more power to people who aren’t necessarily tech people, so they can get more business value with less friction.”

The AI sidekick behaves like a private assistant that understands the user’s role, company and work style, which proactively offers help. It’s essentially a copilot that sits within the Monday.com platform and anticipates what the user is trying to accomplish, enabling their work processes by understanding their day-to-day needs.

For example, if the user works in marketing, the sidekick can pull in data from customer relationship management and email to help generate valuable context, prep messaging and customize talking points for campaigns. If the user is a finance manager, the assistant might pull in budget metrics and offer suggestions for optimizing accounting.

“It knows who you are, your role, and your context,” said Lereya. “It doesn’t just assist; it works with you.”

Monday magic allows users to describe their business flow and needs in simple words. From there the AI system automatically builds the solution using the Monday platform’s AI building blocks, a process that might take hours or days of sifting through different components such as data tables and forms.

For example, a user who wants to build a simple, or complex, workflow for event management can tell monday magic: “I am a community manager running a tech event. I need a solution to manage event requests, coordinate event preparation tasks, speakers and schedules.”

The system takes it from there, generating forms, displays and dashboards — including a community manager dashboard, event coordinator dashboard, speaker manager dashboard and the like — all based on that prompt. The user can then adjust or customize the newly generated “Event Management Hub” using follow-up prompts or manually, as usual.

“It reduces the barrier even more,” Lereya said. “You don’t even need to know how to work with the building blocks.”

Finally, the third capability, monday vibe, enables users to build any business application using natural language prompts. Vibe coding refers to a growing trend in which developers and nontechnical users describe the “vibe” — the functionality and outcome they want — rather than writing code line by line. The AI handles implementation while users focus on vision.

Users describe what they want, and the platform generates tailored, secure code behind the scenes. Because it operates entirely within the Monday.com platform, apps built with vibe coding inherit the company’s enterprise-grade security, compliance features and integration capabilities. This makes them suitable for internal tools or upload to the Monday.com marketplace.

“In the enterprise space, this is going to be huge for us,” said Lereya. “You can build every tool you need and trust that it’s secure, compliant and fully integrated.”

Together, Lereya said these features mark a new phase in Monday.com’s AI strategy, which emphasizes not just assistance, but actual execution. He said AI that can carry out real work, on behalf of the user, within secure and customizable workflows.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer