In the age of LLMs, AI assisted programing and vibe coding can't this all be replicated?
I'm confused why is this a yearly subscription or paid at all?
This tool might as well be open source to be brutally honest.
Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
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Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#12In the age of LLMs, AI assisted programing and vibe coding can't this all be replicated? I'm confused why is this a yearly subscription or paid at all? This tool might as well be open source to be brutally honest.
Yeah that is a fair point, it can be replicated but not many people want to replicate an app and would rather pay for it. The functionality is not hard to replicate but the UX side of things and general support and improvements over time is what people have paid for. There is a lifetime option also - yearly was about offering choices.
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#13I 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.
Even for English (which surely has the best support) anything outside of urban American accents is still incredibly weak - you can pretty much guarantee very noticeable mistakes on even highly intelligible mainstream urban British/Irish/Aussie/Kiwi/SA accents. Stronger regional / rural accents & dialects usually render generated subtitles entirely useless.
Definitely a domain a million miles from being solved if even English is this bad.
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#14In the age of LLMs, AI assisted programing and vibe coding can't this all be replicated? I'm confused why is this a yearly subscription or paid at all? This tool might as well be open source to be brutally honest.
Same goes for Dropbox - you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CSV on the mounted filesystem.
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#15I 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
Youtube is very bad, but I have honestly not yet seen anyone implement this well on any platform, which indicates to me that it's not a solved problem. Very open to being proven wrong here though - do you have examples of Whisper Large in use in a large consumable sample?
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#16I've been building something similar but targeted at bringing content that interests you to your level: https://katarineko.com.
I've been learning Japanese as well and the content at my level is boring while the content I'm interested in is a wall.
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#17>Drop any file. Get accurate subtitles.
This is my main issue with tools like these. Automated subtitles are inherently inaccurate, because much of language depends on context which you cannot get just from a brief snippet of something. This wouldn't be much of an issue if the tool was targeted at people dedicated to creating subtitles, but if you're trying to learn a new language, how are you supposed to know when the output is wrong or not?
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#18Been a pretty happy user of https://www.languagereactor.com
Not seeing a reason to switch atm tbh
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#19Been a pretty happy user of https://www.languagereactor.com Not seeing a reason to switch atm tbh
That’s fair enough! I am curious tho, are there any issues you face while using the app that could be handled better? Or any features that would make it easier to use?
ASR in LR is down often from my experience.
Re: Show HN: SubSmith – Turn your own videos into language-learning material
#20>Drop any file. Get accurate subtitles. This is my main issue with tools like these. Automated subtitles are inherently inaccurate, because much of language depends on context which you cannot get just from a brief snippet of something. This wouldn't be much of an issue if the tool was targeted at people dedicated to creating subtitles, but if you're trying to learn a new language, how are you supposed to know when t…
Yeah that is a very good point, it’s something I thought about a lot when positioning the app. Essentially there are 2 mitigations to this, one is that it’s not really ideal for beginners and mainly targeting intermediate learners who can recognise or at least question errors to a certain extent but don’t want to create the entire subtitle file themselves. There is an inline editor for them to fix the errors.
The other thing is the speech recognition models are very sensitive to the audio. If the audio quality is good then the model would do a good job, I’m not sure how much experience you have with Whisper Large but it is very capable on normal speech. The issues arise when there are many competing sounds overriding each other