Tuesday, December 08, 2020

Sub-titles on YouTube

Today a viewer of one of my YouTube videos sent me the following message: "Thanks for the arabics substitles". While this is gratifying, I have no idea how Arabic subtitles were shown - I can only guess that viewer's own language settings are in Arabic and that YouTube detected this and provided the subtitles by translating my spoken word (reveal - I can't speak Arabic!). 

This is a fantastic piece of technology. It has been around for a while and is getting better all the time. My spoken word in English is automatically translated into other languages - I'm assuming that it is first transcipted into English so that the text can then be translated into any language supported by Google.

Just to check, I turned on sub-titles on one of my videos - my language settings are that English is used. I was surprised to see how accurate YouTube is - despite my Irish accent, there were very few errors in translation. I did not have to do anything when I created the video, and a transcript of my voice is also auto generated. This is brilliant for non-English speaking or for viewers with hearing disabilities.


What will they think of next!   

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