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Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

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Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#1

Post by IbrahimF96 »

I've been learning Japanese for a few years and kept running into a similar problem. I'd find a video I wanted to learn from, hear a useful sentence, and then realise that turning that sentence into something I could study later was both time consuming and draining at times.

I would end up jumping between a video player, subtitles/transcription, a dictionary, screenshots, audio clips and Anki. So I built SubSmith to bring that workflow together.

You can drop a video or audio file into it, generate a transcript locally and then use the transcript alongside the media to:

* look up words and sentences * replay individual lines * edit the transcript * save useful sentences with their original context/audio * export them as Anki cards

The important part for me is that it works with your own media. It isn't tied to a particular streaming service or library, so I can use the random anime episode, podcast, lecture, etc. that I'm actually interested in studying.

It's an offline-first desktop app, and transcription happens locally rather than sending the media to a transcription API.

I'm sharing it here because I'm now more interested in finding out where this workflow breaks down for other people rather than adding features randomly now that I have solid core/base.

For example:

* Would you actually save sentences from your own media? * Which part of this process feels like too much work? * Does having the audio/context attached make creating an Anki card more useful? * Would you prefer this to work inside your existing video player/browser? * Is installing a desktop app a significant barrier? * And does requiring an account before starting the free trial make you give up?

The current version does require an account to start the trial, and I'm trying to work out whether that's meaningful friction for the people who would actually use this.

It's free to try, and I'd particularly appreciate feedback from people who already learn languages through their own videos, anime, films, podcasts or other media.

I'm the developer, so I'll be around in the comments to answer questions and discuss how it works.

https://subsmith.app

Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
subsmith.app

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#2

Post by k__ »

Cool idea!

While I'm not so sure about learning a language with content from fictional sources, that should at least make it more relevant for the learners.

And you can use it on podcasts too, where people talk normally.

The biggest hurdle is probably that users need to get hold of the media so they can use it as input.

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#3

Post by IbrahimF96 »

k__ wrote: post #2

Cool idea! While I'm not so sure about learning a language with content from fictional sources, that should at least make it more relevant for the learners. And you can use it on podcasts too, where people talk normally. The biggest hurdle is probably that users need to get hold of the media so they can use it as input.

Thanks! There is a whole like subsection of language learning called immersion based learning. Fictional sources can be OK just depends on how specialised and unique the vocabulary is.

Yeah that is my suspicion too, I am considering adding an option to transcribe system audio too so it could hook into whatever video or audio is playing on the computer. That would be quite a big change so would like feedback first! hahah

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#5

Post by posh_somme »

I've been learning Japanese for just over a year now, and its a community that might have the highest concentration of amazing free learning apps with sentence mining capabilities, many of which do things very similarly to what you're building. Have you tried some of these?

asbplayer Manatan Yomine Anki Miner AnimeCards Nagare

These are just for video, there are other similar solutions for games, manga and ebooks, and some of them are all in one

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#6

Post by IbrahimF96 »

adamddev1 wrote: post #4

I love having auto-generated subtitles available, but I am still skeptical that we can call them "accurate" yet. For many languages the models are quite weak, and even for English and German on YouTube I see errors all the time.

Yeah I agree the Youtube ones are not very good, I am not sure what they have implemented behind the scenes for it. However this uses the Whisper Large model which is quite a bit better than the Youtube auto generated ones. Only catch is you need to have the video on disk and wait a bit longer lol

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#7

Post by cybertim »

I build the exact same system, but for (mandarin, simplified) Chinese which i'm learning. Wanted to create such a system for a while, but it's a lot of hooking up the correct libs and making a UI etc. never found the energy. Thanks to 'ai' I was able to do this finally, think more people needed this push :-) It's web-based and can be self-hosted in a docker.

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#8

Post by IbrahimF96 »

posh_somme wrote: post #5

I've been learning Japanese for just over a year now, and its a community that might have the highest concentration of amazing free learning apps with sentence mining capabilities, many of which do things very similarly to what you're building. Have you tried some of these? asbplayer Manatan Yomine Anki Miner AnimeCards Nagare These are just for video, there are other similar solutions for games, manga and ebooks, an…

I've only heard of asbplayer and Anki miner before, the others I haven't. It's a great space tbh, people are building all the time. For me specifically it's about trying to serve all languages to the best of my ability, alot of the ones I've come across only focus on Japanese or a small selection of languages. Also I think there's scope to improve UX and reducing friction for non tech savvy people

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#9

Post by konart »

cybertim wrote: post #7

I build the exact same system, but for (mandarin, simplified) Chinese which i'm learning. Wanted to create such a system for a while, but it's a lot of hooking up the correct libs and making a UI etc. never found the energy. Thanks to 'ai' I was able to do this finally, think more people needed this push :-) It's web-based and can be self-hosted in a docker.

Care to share with a fellow learner? :)

Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material

#10

Post by IbrahimF96 »

cybertim wrote: post #7

I build the exact same system, but for (mandarin, simplified) Chinese which i'm learning. Wanted to create such a system for a while, but it's a lot of hooking up the correct libs and making a UI etc. never found the energy. Thanks to 'ai' I was able to do this finally, think more people needed this push :-) It's web-based and can be self-hosted in a docker.

Nice! Yeah I think the functionality is never very complicated, I'm more so interested the UX and trying to add features that reduce friction and slowly build an app that can be stable and relied upon.
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