AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

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emuler
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AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by emuler »   1 likes

Two new players have entered this field.

https://otter.ai/
https://www.descript.com/

This should be an excellent starting point for any English language films that don't have subtitles.
Sadly, only English at the moment, as far as I can figure out. Please look for similar resources in your language.

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ghost
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by ghost »   1 likes

This is a very interesting subject. I have still many English movies without subtitles.

I tested Otter.ai and Descript today with Lou ( https://www.first-loves.com/forums/view ... =35&t=7822 ) and really got very good results.

But the speech must be clear, otherwise words or whole phrases get skipped. I'd say that these AI stuff can save you about 70 - 80 % work.
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deadman
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by deadman »   2 likes

ghost wrote:This is a very interesting subject. I have still many English movies without subtitles.

I tested Otter.ai and Descript today with Lou ( https://www.first-loves.com/forums/view ... =35&t=7822 ) and really got very good results.

But the speech must be clear, otherwise words or whole phrases get skipped. I'd say that these AI stuff can save you about 70 - 80 % work.
A good set of time codes is worth the price of admission. Correcting poorly transcribed or awkwardly translated text is manageable. Occasional skipped lines or several speakers lumped together into a single long line, that's to be expected. It should diminish with every revision of the software. You'd need a sentient AI, or something close, to get everything perfect but rough results that require proofreading and manual correction is within reach and would eliminate the worst of the tedious work.
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emuler
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by emuler »   2 likes

deadman wrote:
ghost wrote:This is a very interesting subject. I have still many English movies without subtitles.

I tested Otter.ai and Descript today with Lou ( https://www.first-loves.com/forums/view ... =35&t=7822 ) and really got very good results.

But the speech must be clear, otherwise words or whole phrases get skipped. I'd say that these AI stuff can save you about 70 - 80 % work.
A good set of time codes is worth the price of admission. Correcting poorly transcribed or awkwardly translated text is manageable. Occasional skipped lines or several speakers lumped together into a single long line, that's to be expected. It should diminish with every revision of the software. You'd need a sentient AI, or something close, to get everything perfect but rough results that require proofreading and manual correction is within reach and would eliminate the worst of the tedious work.
I'm also hopeful that Descript's function of subtitle creation from a plain text transcript will help to correct the timings for subs that are difficult to adjust by other means. We could try to take a subtitle file that's not syncing properly, delete all the time stamps (can be done fairly easily), then submit the remaining text to Descript to match up with the audio from the film.
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Nasuada
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by Nasuada »   0 likes

It's interesting what you can do today with AI. A few years ago my wish was, that I can let translate videos from a language who I don't understand, so with that tools we reaching that level slowly. I'm also fascinating, that I can now let let translate words on the fly under iOS 15 on the iPhone, so it's now possible to talk in my language and the other person will read it in his language.

I hope that will be available soon for other languages and not only for english.
However, you should always be a little careful with AI, because it is far from infallible. Such translations can then also have serious errors, if you rely too much on the fact that everything will fit.

I have now seen two posts on the subject where artificial intelligence generated the content of a show based on information from old posts. Once it was a TV show and once someone did it on YouTube. What came out was anything but serious. It was absolute nonsense.... Still.
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Night457
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by Night457 »   1 likes

Nasuada wrote:However, you should always be a little careful with AI, because it is far from infallible. Such translations can then also have serious errors, if you rely too much on the fact that everything will fit.
So what you are saying is, do not get in a fight with someone based on the translation you read on your phone, right?

If only people had that much sense! :(
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Nasuada
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by Nasuada »   2 likes

That might be good advice, yes. I just imagine myself insulting someone thanks to a translator and then being confused that I'm suddenly lying on the floor with a bleeding nose. And when you end up at the police station and explain what happened and the translator tells you that you really want to go to jail...

This could also be an entertaining short film.
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ghost
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by ghost »   3 likes

Forget everything you've been using for transcribing subtitles so far!

There's Whisper AI!! Developed from the same people who created ChatGPT.
https://github.com/openai/whisper

I did some tests and it blew me away! It's so accurate in creating automatic subtitles and even can translate them at the same time. I tested it with a danish short film and it gave me nearly perfect english subtitles! Even perfect grammar! And it supports more than 100 languages!

The best thing: it's for free.

A turorial how to use it in Google Drive:


Another option is using freesubtitles.ai. It's for free up to 60 minutes:


Even the latest version of SubtitleEdit has speech-to-text using Whisper!

Yes, Whipser is slow, but it is giving you such great results and a perfect translation. Only still some timing problems.
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by DreamScape »   0 likes

Speechmatics falls on its face trying to decipher Danish, so I'm excited to try this.
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Night457
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Re: AI assisted transcription and subtitle creation

Post by Night457 »   0 likes

ghost wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 7:33 pm Even the latest version of SubtitleEdit has speech-to-text using Whisper!
And when I JUST finished a subtitle translation where I attempted to fill in the missing Swedish lines by ear!

(No, I am NOT going back over it again. I am done. Just because I have not posted it yet is no reason to start it all over again.)

Thank you ghost for the good news!
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