Features Introducing Automatic Subtitling Maarten VerwaestJanuary 29, 2017 Ghent, 29th January 2017 – Ever more producers and content agencies are looking to automate video captioning. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and automated spotting of subtitles are the key to minimise the cost and the production time otherwise caused by manual subtitling. Because expensive subtitles (or the lack thereof) may hamper the retrievability and the accessibility of valuable content, we took the challenge to radically automate the process. Why Automatic Subtitling For producers of audiovisual content, including Film, Television and Corporate Video, subtitling has become an essential part of the production process. An estimated 10% of the people with an aural disability depend on it to fully appreciate the content. Also it is best practice to publish non-broadcast content with complementary subtitles, because people not necessarily want to switch on their audio. As a spill over, subtitles delivered alongside the video will improve the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for video. However, the cost of subtitling is significant. Depending on the type of content, it may take 10 to 20 hours hours of manual work to manually edit subtitles of 50′ documentary or drama. So we asked ourselves the question what it would take to radically automate the subtitling process and we cracked the code. Limecraft Approach to AI Subtitling To automate the subtitling process, our development team was faced with a number of different challenges. Turning audio into text is the easy part, as we have been offering AI transcription services since 2013. Turning the transcript into high-quality subtitles is the more challenging bit. First of all we rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) to remove the non-meaningful words. Subsequently we had to segment the resulting transcription into separate lines of text (captions) according to a specific set of rules. The styling rules are different from producer to producer, so we had to make them configurable. From a user’s point of view, we strive to hide all underlying complexity in a nice and easy to use interface. You may instruct us to produce subtitles with a simple click. Subtitles are displayed side by side with the transcript, to enable quality control and manual correction if necessary. You can play the sequence with the subtitles. When finished, you can export the subtitles in any format of choice (SRT, STL, EBU-TT-D), or export them as burned-in subtitles or open captions. Key Benefits While for some cases the automatically generated captions are good enough, you’ll appreciate the ability to review and to correct what the machine generated in the first place. In either case we anticipate a cost saving of 60% to 80%, depending on the quality of the audio used for transcription. More importantly, as we took great care of the usability, journalists and reporters can now produce subtitles themselves and make their story immediately available for distribution. From the feedback we received up to date, we understood that the shorter cycle time is at least as important as the reduced cost. The Limecraft subtitling services are available free of extra charges when using the Limecraft platform. 💡 If you would like to give it a try, please activate your account, or drop us a line on info@limecraft.com in case you need more information.