Yubo, the live social discovery app for Gen Z, has expanded its audio moderation technology for livestreams across four of its largest markets: the US, UK, Australia and Canada. In partnership with Hive, Yubo introduced the technology in the US at the end of May, becoming the first major social media platform in the world to tackle the challenges of real-time audio analysis. 

Yubo notes that while significant strides have been made in the advancement of real-time image and video moderation technology, audio moderation has remained an unsolved challenge. Roughly half of people who have reported experiencing harassment in online gaming – where livestreaming has historically been most prevalent – were targeted by voice, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. 

Yubo has since expanded the trial phase to include all majority-English speaking regions where it has large user bases. Although still in its infancy, Yubo said the technology has proven to be particularly effective at detecting potential real-world risk, such as violence to others or self-harm. 

Hive’s audio moderation technology on Yubo currently works by recording and automatically transcribing 10-second snippets of audio in livestreams of 10 or more people. The text is then instantly scanned using artificial intelligence. Only transcripts containing words or phrases that violate the app’s Community Guidelines are flagged for review by Yubo’s Safety Specialists, who begin investigating the incidents in real time to determine what actions should be taken, including whether it is necessary to escalate to law enforcement. Transcripts with no suspected violations are not reviewed nor kept. 

The algorithms that power the technology use machine learning, so will continue to improve and become more precise with time. To protect user privacy, livestream transcripts that have not been flagged for investigation are deleted after 24 hours. Transcripts that are flagged and require investigation internally or by law enforcement are stored for up to a year. 

Yubo said that audio moderation keywords now trigger an average of 600 livestreams per day for review by Safety Specialists, but that a significant number of these are false positives – instances where, for example, a song playing in the background or playful language containing triggering keywords are flagged for review, but are not actually instances of harmful speech.

False positives highlight not just the complexity of effective online content moderation, but also the importance of combining technical tools with human oversight for nuance and context. Thats why at Yubo human moderators always have the final say on what moderation action to take and continuously supervise the detection algorithms. 

“Our expansion of audio moderation technology is not only a key element of Yubo’s ever-evolving safety product roadmap, but a critical development in expanding the parameters of online safety industry-wide,” said Yubo Chief Operating Officer Marc-Antoine Durand. “There is still a lot of progress to be made in the area of voice detection, but we are proud to be forging a path for our peers by being the first to launch audio moderation with Hive and helping make this tool more reliable and effective through this trial.”ABOUT HIVE.AI

Hive is the leading provider of cloud-based AI solutions for understanding content. The company empowers developers with a portfolio of best-in-class, pre-trained AI models for content tagging and intelligent search capabilities, serving billions of customer API requests every month. Hive also offers turnkey software applications powered by proprietary AI models and datasets, enabling breakthrough use cases across industries. Together, Hive’s solutions are transforming content moderation, platform integrity, brand protection, sponsorship measurement, ad operations, and more. For more information, visit thehive.ai or follow on LinkedIn.