Video on Demand (VOD) and streaming services are cornerstones of entertainment, education, and sports broadcasting. However, language barriers often hinder their potential to make a truly global impact. Subtitle generation can be your key to unlocking global audiences, maximizing your video’s impact and reach. In this article, we’ll discuss the value of subtitles and how we’ve applied the power of AI to generate accurate subtitles automatically in our newest streaming feature, AI Automated Speech Recognition (AI ASR), addressing some of the challenges posed by current solutions.
How Can Subtitles Elevate Your Service?
Subtitles are not just an add-on; they’re a powerful tool that can significantly boost the value and reach of your service. Here’s why:
- Boost engagement: Engagement is critical in the digital content space, where competition for viewers’ attention is fierce. Subtitles can dramatically increase viewer retention, resulting in a 12% increase in watch time.
- Going global: Subtitles make your content accessible to a worldwide audience, breaking down language barriers and opening up new markets.
- Accessibility: According to WHO, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss worldwide by 2050, rendering subtitles essential to this vast audience. Subtitles can boost your brand’s reputation and increase your audience base.
- SEO: Subtitles in SRT or VTT formats are indexed by search engines, aiding in video search engine optimization (VSEO) and improving your content’s visibility on search platforms and video-sharing networks.
Incorporating subtitles into your service is a strategic decision that can lead to higher engagement, expanded global reach, and improved accessibility, making your platform more attractive and competitive.
The Challenges of Self-Deployed AI-Generated Subtitles
Each step of subtitling, from transcribing dialogue to synchronizing subtitles with the video’s pace, demands painstaking precision and an eye for detail. If you opt for an in-house, self-deployed solution like Whisper, significant time and effort are required, and there’s no guarantee of a professional-quality outcome. Let’s take a quick look at the problems of out-of-the-box AI subtitles.
Deployment, maintenance, and scalability
Deploying and fine-tuning an out-of-the-box ASR system like Whisper can take your team as long as three months, diverting focus from core business objectives. Once deployed, it requires ongoing support and fails to scale effectively with increasing content volumes.
Compliance, security, and integration challenges
Maintaining data privacy and meeting industry regulations demands ongoing investment. Integration with existing systems can cause compatibility issues and disrupt operations, requiring further resource allocation.
Complexity, integration, and customization
Integrating an out-of-the-box ASR and customizing it for use with other systems and AI models is a complex task. Performance and accuracy may be suboptimal, resulting in a failure to reap the full benefits of subtitles.
Gcore’s AI ASR Subtitling Solution: Faster, Smarter, Streamlined
Our innovative solution elegantly addresses the challenges posed by existing solutions. We’ve enhanced Whisper with cutting-edge models and infrastructure to bring a wealth of benefits to our customers:
- Accuracy: By integrating the Pyannote model for speaker diarization (also called Voice Activity Detection or VAD), we’ve honed in on speech within audio tracks with unmatched accuracy. This ensures that every word is captured, accurately transcribed into subtitles, and accurately attributed to the speaker. To ensure that translations are both natural and precise across languages, we’ve incorporated the Seamless model from Meta. This reduces the word error rate (WER) to as low as 5%—in line with industry-leading results—and eradicates “hallucinations” in various languages.
- Performance: Our infrastructure and hardware, including GPUs and IPUs, support high-performing AI models, facilitating the integration of a wide range of open-source models.
- Scalability: Adapt effortlessly to increasing content demands, maintaining smooth and efficient video processing at vast scale.
- Subtitle synchronization: A dedicated system aligns timestamps and compiles VTT files, ensuring subtitles are synchronized with video content for an engaging viewing experience.
- Assured data privacy: With all processing performed on our own secure infrastructure, your video content remains strictly confidential.
- Quick launch: Benefit from an immediately available, pre-optimized solution to accelerate your market entry.
- Cutting-edge technology: Stay updated with the latest ASR models, ensuring cutting-edge performance without any effort on your side.
- Seamless integration: Our API integrates smoothly into existing workflows, saving your time and resources.
- Value for money: Optimize your expenses by automating subtitling tasks and scaling according to your business demands. Pay only for the translations you need, and enjoy free original-language transcription.
These components are integrated through an event-driven architecture, creating a cohesive, efficient, and scalable subtitle generation system, demonstrating our dedication to supporting the evolving needs of content creators and distributors.
By integrating sophisticated AI technologies to automate subtitle generation, Gcore Streaming Platform AI ASR reduces the time and resources required for deployment and ongoing management. This strategic enhancement enables you to reallocate critical resources effectively, so you can focus on your core business objectives and enjoy a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective operational environment.
Conclusion
Gcore’s advanced AI-powered subtitling solution, AI ASR, is a game-changer for organizations seeking to elevate their customer experience without dedicating extensive resources to in-house development and support. By automating the subtitle generation process, Gcore minimizes your deployment and maintenance efforts so your team can redirect its focus toward strategic business goals. This innovation presents a seamless, cost-effective, and scalable approach. Learn more in our dedicated Product Documentation.
Give your videos the global reach and accessibility they deserve with Gcore Video Streaming. Contact us today and let’s discuss how we can empower your video strategy. Or, check out our short demo videofor a quick overview and see the magic for yourself.
To see Gcore’s AI Subtitle Solution in action, please click on the “Subtitles” icon in the navigation bar and choose “English.”
