FEED Winter 2024 Newsletter

across the media industry, working with the BBC, 3Cat and Skydance to reduce localisation times and produce subtitles in over 40 language pairs. Finally, Cinedeck – which offers various solutions across the entire video workflow – recognised the resource-heavy nature of captioning, calling it a ‘no-brainer’ to incorporate AI technology into its all-in-one platform, Cloudflow Hub. “By integrating real-time AI captions and translations within the Cloudflow Hub solution, we’re delivering an efficient way for providers and broadcasters to make their content more accessible and ultimately reach a wider audience,” Sung summarises. HUMAN TOUCH Despite AI’s abilities, humans are still in the picture (for now). Primarily involved at the QC stage – as is the case with Happy Scribe – a conscious mind (or two) is still the best tool when spotting mistakes. Put more succinctly, “While AI accelerates the process and handles much of the automation, human oversight is still integral to maintain quality, cultural relevance and contextual accuracy,” explains Afsar. There may come a point in which AI replaces the human element, but experts largely agree that the technology is not quite there yet. “There’s still some way to go before it can fully capture the complex

nuance in human language and always get it right, particularly with sensitive issues,” argues Sung. Returning to the Stranger Things example, captioning, subtitling and dubbing can be considered an art form – something beyond a bot’s capabilities. Trained linguists tend to offer a broader vocabulary shaped by whatever’s happening on screen, such as ‘sinister’, ‘ferocious’ and ‘dissonant’ – words all used to describe the audio in Season 4. In Squid Game – originally recorded in Korean – Netflix hired professional voice actors to dub the hit show in over 20 languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian and Turkish. By using genuine human voices, the dubs arguably maintain the show’s authenticity as much as possible – though watching in the original Korean remains the most reliable option. That said, “AI capabilities are improving at a remarkable and exponential rate,” notes Biggar. “With continuous improvements driven by machine learning, it may only be a matter of time before AI reaches or even exceeds human-level quality.” Sung echoes this cautious prophesying: “Human language and cultures are so complex that it’s hard to imagine that AI will entirely replace humans in this process, but technology is evolving so quickly that it’s hard to say what will happen in the future!”

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