In the past few years, there has been a major shift towards video content as the primary form of media. Considering this momentum, the importance of closed captioning has only increased. However, delivering closed captions at scale is challenging for media and entertainment companies—they are costly to create, and the manual undertaking can be burdensome to production teams. Surrounding all of this is also the ever-changing compliance landscape, wherein adapting closed captions to meet regional or industrial guidelines can be tricky.
Today, IBM has introduced Watson Captioning, a new standalone offering that helps to solve these challenges. Watson Captioning leverages AI to automate the captioning process, while ensuring increased accuracy over time through its machine learning capabilities. In turn, this saves businesses both time and money, and delivers a scalable solution. Watson Captioning is a customizable offering that provides flexibility and productivity, can be easily managed across compliance standards, and has the potential to transform industries beyond media and entertainment.
Watson Captioning provides a seamless user experience with tools like Machine Generated Captions, Embedded Smart Layout, Watson Caption Editor, and Live Captioning. The product is customizable, giving each company the option to input a unique glossary of words and phrases for proper context and accuracy. Looking ahead, Watson-generated captions will deliver sound/audio descriptions that can be edited and formatted in real-time. From there, adapting captions to meet compliance standards is far easier. Live Captioning provides broadcasters with the ability to cover content ranging from nightly news, to live sporting events—bringing reliable captioning to viewers in near real-time.
Delivering flexibility and streamlined workflows
With a host of user-friendly features, Watson Captioning gives companies the unique ability to customize and control all aspects of the captioning process. The custom glossary enables companies to create a glossary of words or proprietary terminology, specific to their offerings or industry, increasing recognition and accuracy rates and reducing the need for manual intervention. With the Caption Editor tool, users have the ability to edit captions in real-time within the interface, and thanks to embedded Smart Layout, lines within captions are automatically separated based on natural pauses in speech or by punctuation. Watson-generated captions are backed by AI and machine learning, and increase in accuracy and efficiency over time. With the end-to-end captioning process handled, Watson Captioning frees up production teams to focus more on the creative and editorial aspects of production.
Navigating the compliance landscape
The regulatory environment surrounding compliant video content is often variable, with the rules differing based on industry, geographic location, and delivery medium. With Watson Captioning, companies can take automatically-generated captions and easily alter them to their specific compliance needs. This solution not only addresses regulations surrounding captioning, but can aid in compliance for video content at large. By adding a layer of searchable, textual data to video libraries, flagging content that includes profanity, violence, or flagged content is made simpler.
Moving captioning beyond media + entertainment
At first glance, it’s clear to see how Watson Captioning can benefit media companies, however the use cases reach far beyond just media and entertainment. Consider how captioning technology could increase the accessibility of education. Between online video lectures and live-streamed seminars, the potential to increase viewer accessibility is huge. For the enterprise, Watson Captioning makes a strong case for uniting diverse workforces with better accessibility to live-streamed events, town halls, and more.
As video content continues to grow in popularity, companies must ensure audiences have proper access to reliable closed captioning. Watson Captioning aims to tackle the efficiency gap in this process, empowering companies to better meet audience needs while promoting a streamlined workflow.
Read here to learn more on Watson Captioning.