Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has signed a deal to use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI to generate subtitles for its programming across platforms. WBD claims that the company’s Caption AI system will enable it to significantly reduce production time and costs, while also improving the accuracy of subtitles for US audiences.
The technology will initially be used on unscripted programming, including news, sports and reality shows on Max, CNN, Discovery+, etc. WBD claims the system can reduce subtitling time by up to 80% and subtitling costs by up to 50%. While a level of human review will remain for quality assurance, the company claims this approach helps refine and train Caption AI’s workflow to improve over time.
But subtitling requires a lot of skill, and especially in live TV, transcribers need to get what’s being said as accurately as possible. And unscripted shows tend to have a lot of overlapping dialogue, so it’s unclear whether AI can transcribe that accurately. But by any standards, the more we rely on AI-generated transcripts, the less work there is for people in this field.
It will be interesting to see if WBD expands this technology to subtitling scripted shows. Subtitling (I used to do it for a living) is an art. It involves, among other things, accurately capturing sound effects, musical cues, and non-verbal speech, properly explaining idiomatic expressions for localization, making sure the subtitles are timed properly, etc. There are a lot of nuances involved, and it would be hard for an AI to get it right.
WBD’s focus on Caption AI as a cost-saving measure isn’t surprising: the company has been aggressively cutting costs (and bolstering revenue) since it was formed in 2022 from the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery.
