Warner Bros. Discovery teams up with Google to generate captions using AI

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has agreed a deal with Google Cloud to use the latter’s Vertex AI to generate captions for programming across a variety of platforms. WBD claims that its Caption AI system can significantly reduce production time and costs while improving the accuracy of captions for US-based viewers.

The tech will be used for unscripted programming at the outset, which could include news, sports and reality TV across the likes of Max, CNN and Discovery+. WBD claims the system can reduce the time it takes to create captions by up to 80 percent and captioning costs by up to 50 percent. There will still be a level of human review for quality assurance, and the company claims this approach will help refine and train Caption AI’s workflow to improve it over time.

However, captioning requires a lot of skill, especially for live TV where transcribers have to keep up with what’s being said as accurately as possible. Unscripted programming also tends to include a lot of overlapping chatter and it’s unclear just how effective AI will be at transcribing that accurately. However you slice it though, relying more on AI-generated transcriptions will mean less work for people in the space.

It’ll be interesting to see whether WBD expands this tech to subtitles for scripted programming. Subtitling (something I admittedly used to do for a living) is a skilled art. Among other things, it involves accurately capturing sound effects, music cues and non-verbal utterances; properly explaining idioms for localization purposes; and making sure subtitles are timed properly. There’s a ton of nuance involved, and it would be difficult for AI to get it right.

It’s hardly surprising that WBD is looking at Caption AI as a way to save money. The company has been aggressively cutting costs (and trying to bolster its revenue) since it formed in 2022 with the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/warner-bros-discovery-teams-up-with-google-to-generate-captions-using-ai-161345238.html?src=rss