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UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES The pandemic has slowed down production radically. Companies have reached into archived content, which has occasionally resulted in unexpectedly rich content offerings – clip-based shows, nostalgia TV and pop-up channels based on specific content types. Some of this might have only received basic captioning, some none at all, so companies are trying to find good tools to let them do these at scale. Foreign language subtitling is also an essential part of increasing the potential audience for this new content (many English speakers watched K-Drama in lockdown). Again, easy-to-use tech is vital if these releases are to be done quickly and to the highest quality. It’s probably safe to say that, without an AI boost, a lot of the revived content exchanged globally over the last year would still be waiting for sign-off. Most videos published or livestreamed on YouTube, Facebook or Twitch will not get this kind of care – at least not for a while. But Netflix-quality captioning for social media is something we should aspire to. With the right mix of technology, workflows and regulation, there’s no reason high-quality captioning shouldn’t be an an option on every platform.
the automated help of AI – then that transcript is converted into captioning. “But how do you get the quality?” asks Wise. “Speech to text is only so good, about 90 or 95% correct. So, we either use human intervention to
correct that, or give customers a workflow that they can look at confidence scoring on the words and do things like autocorrection.” Captions need to be formatted properly, too,
THE ONUS IS ON THE CONTENT PROVIDER TO PROVE THAT THE CAPTIONING IS HIGH QUALITY
and each platform may have its own peculiar style guide for formatting. Tools like Digital Nirvana’s can help automate the process, incorporating the appropriate style guide into the workflow. This can be an aid in submitting content to Netflix, for example, who are very particular about their captioning quality. Digital Nirvana also has tools for doing QA at the end of the process.
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