AI could end foreign-language subtitles
1–10 of 221 posts
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#2About as likely as I am to sit through a blockbuster with my friends and family deepfaked onto the cast.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#3This would be a lovely option to have and I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of.
Adding text to movies has a huge array of advantages: it preserves the original performances, it makes the dialog accessible to people with hearing or auditory processing disabilities, they can be multiplexed in a way that audio cannot, etc. Obviously it would be wonderful to have an 'autodub' option! But the times where one would use it seem quite narrow.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#4Completely besides whether this is possible (I think it is; it's an offline learning problem with huge resources/economic potential and it's getting attention) I actually prefer subtitles...
Coming from Germany, this wasn't always the case, but nowadays watching dubbed content feels so weird and impoverished, I don't even want to imagine what it'd be like knowing that the voice is fully synthetic.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#5I would much rather we use AI to improve subtitling. Better auto speech recognition, per-word millisecond synchronization, positioning based on speaker/screen content-- all these could improve the subtitled experience and would be way less creepy than deepfake voices.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#6This would be a lovely option to have and I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. Adding text to movies has a huge array of advantages: it preserves the original performances, it makes the dialog accessible to people with hearing or auditory processing disabilities, they can be multiplexed in a way that audio cannot, etc. Obviously it would be wond…
Coming from a non english country I can assure you that dubbing is the worst. When we were kids we would actively avoid watching anything that was dubbed as soon as we could read.
It’s actually funny seeing how frustrated with subtitles my American girlfriend gets when we watch anything foreign. “You mean this basic skill every 7 year old has is hard for you, an educated super smart 30 year old? Bwahahaha”
I still prefer watching everything with subtitles. Actors mumble a lot.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#7I grew up consuming movies and TV shows with subtitles so it has never bothered me. My theory is that if you're not used to them, then they are really annoying. Most of my American friends do not like them.
There is something about watching a movie/show in its original language that you cannot understand. I think its awesome to be immersed in a different world, getting the sounds, inflections, etc from a different language of yours. I will always prefer subtitles to dubbed versions if possible.
I understand some people don't, but I think it's just a matter of being exposed to it. And probably the younger, the better.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#8Translation barely works with text, it's still too literal, doubt this can be human-equivalent for a long time.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#9Absolutely coming.
Goupon founder Andrew Mason's new startup Descript does a fantastic job editing podcasts from text. This same sort of tooling is absolutely going to make it into film.
This sort of stuff is already trivially possible with zero effort:
https://fakeyou.com/w2l/result/WR:t5m9xayqcwkjf9wng3nb4sxgzh...
In ten years, we'll be able to reposition actors and fix flubbed takes. We won't have to visit set, use expensive lenses, or do many of the things that make Hollywood the domain of the rich and well funded.
In thirty years, we'll just tell the machines what we want to watch.
Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles
#10I would much rather we use AI to improve subtitling. Better auto speech recognition, per-word millisecond synchronization, positioning based on speaker/screen content-- all these could improve the subtitled experience and would be way less creepy than deepfake voices.
Yes! My perennial problem is that most Chinese TV content has excellent subtitles, but they're burned in to the videos. So if I want to watch a Chinese show with a friend who doesn't read Chinese, there's no option even for auto-translated subtitles. I've often thought of writing a script to generate subtitle files using text recognition, but haven't gotten around to it.