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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37011397
The popular open-source VLC video player was demonstrated on the floor of CES 2025 with automatic AI subtitling and translation, generated locally and offline in real time. Parent organization VideoLAN shared a video on Tuesday in which president Jean-Baptiste Kempf shows off the new feature, which uses open-source AI models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages.
I was just thinking, this is exactly what AI should be used for. Pattern recognition, full stop.
Yup, and if it isn’t perfect that is ok as long as it is close enough.
Like getting name spellings wrong or mixing homophones is fine because it isn’t trying to be factually accurate.
Problem ist that now people will say that they don’t get to create accurate subtitles because VLC is doing the job for them.
Accessibility might suffer from that, because all subtitles are now just “good enough”
Or they can get OK ones with this tool, and fix the errors. Might save a lot of time
Regular old live broadcast closed captioning is pretty much ‘good enough’ and that is the standard I’m comparing to.
Actual subtitles created ahead of time should be perfect because they have the time to double check.
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From experience AI translation is still garbage, specially for languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean , but if it only subtitles in the actual language such creating English subtitles for English then it is probably fine.
That’s probably more due to lack of training than anything else. Existing models are mostly made by American companies and trained on English-language material. Naturally, the further you get from the model, the worse the result.
It is not the lack of training material that is the issue, it doesn’t understand context and cultural references. Someone commented here that crunchyroll AI subtitles translated Asura Hall a name to asshole.
It would be able to behave like it understands context and cultural references it if it had the appropriate training data, no problem.
I highly doubt that it will be as good as human translation anytime soon, maybe around 10 years or so. Also they have profanity filters and they also hallucinate a lot. https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-peak-data-google-deepmind-researchers-solution-test-time-compute-2025-1
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I have a feeling that if you care enough about subtitles you’re going to look for good ones, instead of using “ok” ai subs.
I imagine it would be not-exactly-simple-but-not- complicated to add a “threshold” feature. If Ai is less than X% certain, it can request human clarification.
Edit: Derp. I forgot about the “real time” part. Still, as others have said, even a single botched word would still work well enough with context.
That defeats the purpose of doing it in real time as it would introduce a delay.
Derp. You’re right, I’ve added an edit to my comment.
I’d like to see this fix the most annoying part about subtitles, timing. find transcript/any subs on the Internet and have the AI align it with the audio properly.
YES! I can’t stand when subtitles are misaligned to the video. If this AI tool could help with that, it would be super useful.