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Not against this feature, but this quote made me laugh:
… once this is in place, people won't have to scour the internet for sourcing subtitles to their favorite movies, shows, or even anime.
As if MTL will get anywhere near the nuance of a properly made human translation.
Personally, I would be happy even if it didn't translate it but were able to give some half decent transcription of, at least, English voice into English text. I prefer having subtitles, even when I speak the language, because it helps in noisy environments and/or when the characters mumble / have weird accents.
However, even that would likely be difficult with a lightweight model. Even big companies like Google often struggle with their autogenerated subtitles. When there's some very context-specific terminology, or uncommon names, it fumbles. And adding translation to an already incorrect transcript multiplies the nonsense, even if the translation were technically correct.
It's not every day that you see actually useful applications of AI, but this might be one.
It is probably good that OS community are exploring this however I'm not sure the technology is ready (or will ever be maybe) and it potentially undermines the labour intensive activity of producing high quality subtitling for accessibility.
I use them quite a lot and I've noticed they really struggle on key things like regional/national dialects, subject specific words and situations where context would allow improvement (e.g. a word invented solely in the universe of the media). So it's probably managing 95% accuracy which is that danger zone where its good enough that no one checks it but bad enough that it can be really confusing if you are reliant on then. If we care about accessibility we need to care about it being high quality.
Oh so that wasn't a joke from their booth.
This seems really out of place, but locally ran auto subtitles from ethically sourced AI would be great.
It's just that there's two very big conditions in that sentence there.
Which AI is the ethically-sourced one
There are a number of open weight open source models out there with all their data sourced from the public domain. Look up BLOOM and Falcon. There are others.
JetBrains' AI code suggestions were only trained on code where authors gave explicit permission for it, but that's the only one I know from the top of my head. Most chat-oriented LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini...) were almost certainly trained using corporate piracy.
This is not by default bad thing, if it is something you only use when you decide to do so, when you don't have other subtitles available tbh. I hate AI slop too but people just go to monkey brain rage mode when they read AI and stop processing any further information.
I'd still always prefer human translated subtitles if possible. However, right now I'm looking into translating entire book via LLM cause it would be only way to read that book, as it is not published in any language I speak. I speak English well enough, so I don't really need subtitles, just like to have them on so I won't miss anything.
For English language movies, I'd probably just watch them without subtitles if those were AI, as I don't really need them, more like nice to have in case I miss something. For languages I don't understand, it might be good, although I wager it will be quite bad for less common languages.
If youtube transcriptions is anything to go by this won't be great. But I'm optimistic
Youtube transcriptions are suprisingly abysmal considering what technology google already has at hand.
I find them pretty good for English spoken by native speakers. For anything else it's horrible.
As long as they are talking about normal things and not playing D&D 😃
I actually disagree.
I'm consistently impressed whenever I have auto-subtitles turned on on Youtube.
I'm not impressed by the subtitles themselves (they're just ok) but rather by how accessible it is. Like it being an option rather than it being a "tool for creators" or limited to premium or something
Or maybe youtube has added so much dogshit features recently (like ai overviews, automatically adding info cards for anyone mentioned, and highlighting seemingly random words in comments to search it outside of context) that it makes me appreciate these things more lol
They're helpful to my deaf ears, even when they're wrong (50% of the words) they do give me a solid idea of what is being said together with what the audio sounds like.
With it, I get almost everything correct. Without it, I understand near to nothing.
This only goes for English spoken by Americans and sometimes London Britons, sadly, nothing else get detected nearly as good enough, so I can't enjoy YouTube in my native language (Dutch), but being able to consume English YouTube already helps a lot!
That is very true. It's hard to find local subtitles to a lot of stuff. And the whole deaf angle :)
I've been messing with more recent open-source AI Subtitling models via Subtitle Editor which has a nice GUI for it. Quality is much better these days, at least for English. It still makes mistakes, but the mistakes are on the level of "I misheard what they said and had little context for the conversation" or "the speaker has an accent which makes it hard to understand what they're saying" mistakes, which is way better than most YouTube Auto Transriptions I've seen.
Pandora's Box is already open. Might as well make use of it.
I've seen some pretty piss poor implementations on streaming apps but if anyone can get it right it's VLC
If it's opt in/opt out then am fine with that.
Not only is it opt in, it's also running fully locally on your machine.
My biggest issue with that is the amount of bloat a full local LLM implementation would add.
But if it's an optional module that you can choose to add (or choose not to add) after the fact, I have no complaint.
It won't be better than human translated ones but begter than no subtitles. I don't think even humans can make subtitles correctly without knowing context
Honestly, if it can generate subtitle files it'll be a huge benefit to people creating subtitles. It's way easier to start with bad subs and fix them than it is to write from scratch.
Yeah true. Good feature anyways
Im curious What makes what VLC is doing qualify as artificial intelligence instead of just an automated transcription plugin?
Automated transcription software has been around for decades, I totally understand getting in on the ai hype train but i guess I'm confused as to if software from years past like "dragon naturally speaking" or Shazam are also LLMs that predate openAI or is how those services worked to identify things different from how modern llms work?
automated transcription is AI, neural networks are just better AI sometimes
Llms are a very specific Gennerative AI subset. Not everything AI is LLM, especially stuff like Shazam is pretty traditional AI. It's been around for a while already, and studied for even longer (even back in the 1960s we were already starting to have a field of study in this domain)
I'm ready to deactivate it if it comes with any active component.
What do you mean by active component? Is processing the audio being played back to add subtitles active?
Sending the audio to an LLM in the sky. But I assume it would be local?
Meh, I'll just stick with mpv.
How is MPVs impementation? Does it work fairly well?
Its a command line multimedia player. It's implementation is ideal for minimalists, and easily understood by reading the man pages.
It works very well imo.
What would be actually cool if it could translate foreign movies based on audio and add the English subtitles to it.
I wonder how good it is.
Does it translate from audio or from text?
Does it translate multiple languages, if video has a, b, c languages does it translate all to x.
Does user need to set input language?