Hlavní stránka Info portálu ZČU

When he first stepped into a computer lab in the 1970s, he had no idea that he would one day find himself on the threshold of a technological upheaval. According to Josef Psutka, the equipment universities had back then can’t be compared with what they have today. “We wrote programs by hand, punched them onto tape, and waited a week for the computation to come back. And heaven help you if there was a mistake. Fixing it took another week,” the professor from the Department of Cybernetics of Faculty of Applied Sciences UWB said with a smile. His first touch of a computer was slow but all the more intense. The seed of future artificial intelligence lay in a tangled ribbon of perforated paper.

A turning point in his career came with the Malach project. Josef Psutka recalls the moment he first encountered the name of a world-renowned speech-technology expert: “At the end of the article there was the name Jelinek. I thought: that’s a Czech name. And sure enough – Frederick Jelinek, born in Prague. And I thought, well that’s amazing. A Czech at the top of the world.” The international collaboration opened access to thousands of hours of testimony from Holocaust survivors and helped lift the Czech team among respected players in global science.

Another breakthrough arrived when Czech Television reached out to him. The obligation to subtitle most live broadcasts was beyond what stenographers could handle, so the station turned to Plzeň. “We said, fine, we’ll try an experiment. The BBC can do it, so why couldn’t we?” The Czech subtitling model was born, combining speech recognition with so-called shadow speakers. In the end, the system emerged thanks to a technical trick no one expected at the time: “We arranged it so people could subtitle from home. And they still do. It’s a global oddity,” he explained.

Though he is behind research that has shaped the lives of thousands, he also talks about his students and young researchers. “What matters is that they try what they want, not what I want,” he says. The enthusiasm of beginners, he believes, often shapes the future of the field more than any perfect plan: “I don’t trim back ambitious ideas from young scientists. If there’s even a small chance, I let them go for it.”

The podcast with Professor Josef Psutka offers a deep look into the history of Czech cybernetics. Listen to it below or on Spotify.