Imperial War Museums (IWM), in collaboration with Capgemini and Google Cloud, has launched a groundbreaking project on July 9, 2025, to make over 20,000 hours of its oral history collection accessible through AI-powered transcription and translation. Utilizing Google’s Gemini models, this initiative transforms access to firsthand accounts of 20th-century conflicts, enabling researchers, educators, and the public to explore these archives with unprecedented ease.
IWM partners with Capgemini and Google Cloud for AI-driven oral history access.
Over 20,000 hours of recordings transcribed using Google’s Gemini models.
Features 99% word accuracy and 94% speaker diarization for reliable transcripts.
Platform enables keyword searches, synchronized transcripts, and AI-generated summaries.
Supports researchers, family historians, and deaf users with accessible text formats.
First UK museum to deploy AI transcription at this scale for public use.
IWM’s oral history collection, including 8,000 interviews from 1945 to the 2000s, was previously available only as audio files, posing challenges due to specialized military terminology, varied accents, and inconsistent audio quality. Capgemini and Google Cloud developed a solution using Google’s Gemini models to transcribe, translate, and analyze these recordings. The system extracts metadata, such as names and military units, and generates detailed summaries, reducing a process that would take 22 years manually to just weeks.
The new platform, set to launch later in 2025, allows users to search across interviews using free text, access synchronized transcripts, and explore AI-generated summaries. An innovative “ask a question” feature enables natural language queries, such as “How did you feel after visiting Hiroshima?” providing cited responses from the transcripts. This functionality benefits academic researchers, family historians, and media producers by simplifying access to relevant content. As Nick Hodder, Director of Digital Engagement and Transformation at IWM, stated, “This project is a big step forward in our mission to broadening access to our vast collections.”
The AI-driven platform significantly improves accessibility, particularly for deaf users and those relying on written material, by providing searchable text versions of the audio. Family historians can now easily find accounts related to relatives’ wartime experiences, while curators gain new tools to interpret stories of conflict. Steven Webb, UK Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Capgemini, noted, “This project showcases the profound impact of generative AI in unlocking historical archives and making them accessible in new and engaging ways.”
This collaboration marks a pioneering step for UK museums, combining AI innovation with human expertise to preserve and share the stories of 20th-century conflicts, ensuring their relevance for future generations.
Capgemini is a global business and technology transformation partner, helping organisations to accelerate their dual transition to a digital and sustainable world, while creating tangible impact for enterprises and society. It is a responsible and diverse group of 340,000 team members in more than 50 countries. With its strong over 55-year heritage, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to unlock the value of technology to address the entire breadth of their business needs. It delivers end-to-end services and solutions leveraging strengths from strategy and design to engineering, all fueled by its market leading capabilities in AI, generative AI, cloud and data, combined with its deep industry expertise and partner ecosystem. The Group reported 2024 global revenues of €22.1 billion.
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimised AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organisations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud
IWM (Imperial War Museums) tells the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War. Our unique collections, made up of the everyday and the exceptional, reveal stories of people, places, ideas and events. Using these, we tell vivid personal stories and create powerful physical experiences across our five museums that reflect the realities of war as both a destructive and creative force. We challenge people to look at conflict from different perspectives, enriching their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war and its impact on people's lives.
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