• lime!@feddit.nu
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    4 days ago

    it’s crazy to me that for all the ai “advances” in the past few years nobody has thought to improve subtitling.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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      4 days ago

      Poor deaf kids. Not because they’re being held captive but because they’re relying on shitty automatic captions.
      For example, Czech was only added very recently and the captions really suck, they change the meaning of most sentences and even include spelling errors.

      Everyone making scripted videos should at least:

      1. go through their script to convert it into a transcript (match what’s actually been said – looking at you CGP Grey – and remove visual cues)
      2. upload it for YouTube’s auto-timing (which is not perfect but we’ll take it)

      Too bad the FCC’s captioning act is toothless, even TV stations (like HBO) uploading their content to YouTube don’t bother importing captions even though they’re legally required to.

    • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Andrew Ng did a video when he gradually added noise to the training audio to improve the quality.

      But here we are dealing with homophones so it’s not just turning speech to text, it also needs to be context aware.

      Possible but too expensive to implement automatically.

        • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I’m highlighting that speech to text and context awareness are different skills.

          YouTube is unlikely to waste loads of compute power on subtitles that don’t need it just to capture the occasional edge case.

          • lime!@feddit.nu
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            3 days ago

            i mean, it’s a one-time-per-video thing. they already do tons of processing on every upload.

              • lime!@feddit.nu
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                3 days ago

                right now they’re dynamically generating subtitles every time. that’s way more compute.

                • aow@sh.itjust.works
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                  3 days ago

                  For real? That’s incredibly dumb/expensive compared to one subtitle roll. Can you share where you saw that?

                  • lime!@feddit.nu
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                    3 days ago

                    well, i have no evidence of this. however. looking at the way auto-generated subtitles are served at youtube right now, they are sent individually word-by-word from the server, pick up filler words like “uh”, and sometimes pause for several seconds in the middle of sentences. and they’re not sent by websocket, which means they go through multiple requests over the course of a video. more requests means the server works harder because it can’t just stream the text like it does the video, and the only reason they’d do that other than incompetence (which would surely have been corrected by now, it’s been like this for years) is if the web backend has to wait for the next word to be generated.

                    i would love to actually know what’s going on if anyone has any insight.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      It’s even worse for captions.

      Captions and subtitles aren’t even the same thing.

      In fact, most DVD players don’t even pass the code captioning through HDMI ports, so old captioned DVDs don’t work anymore.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
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        3 days ago

        explain. edited with explanation. i’ve seen the technology connections video, thanks.

        my comment is still about the actual post above, and i was specifically thinking about auto-generated subs rather than, say, movies. apparently that’s not obvious.

    • Ansis100@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      My student friend tells me that the auto-generated captions for non-English MS Teams lecture recordings recently have improved significantly and have even become usable.

    • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl
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      3 days ago

      Probably because a lot of countries either dub the content or it is already in their native laguage. You generally see a lot of subtitles on OpenSubtitles of countries like The Netherlands where that doesn’t happen

        • vxx@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Auto generated subtitles don’t sell ads and don’t aquire personal data.

        • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl
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          3 days ago

          No, but on the fields where there is money to be made for subtitles, like movies and tv shows.

            • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl
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              3 days ago

              Where do you think money for development of new shit comes from? From places where money is made, like TV, movies etc. YouTube doesn’t really make more money because the ads are there.

              And Twitter hahaha I can only laugh at that

                • Vinstaal0@feddit.nl
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                  3 days ago

                  it’s crazy to me that for all the ai “advances” in the past few years nobody has thought to improve subtitling.

                  That’s what OP say, I just responded with the reason why that wasn’t being done. Aka money