Automatic subtitling

This innovation project focuses on the subtitling of short-form and live online video content. This type of content lends itself to the development of an open and extensible AI-driven toolset that can automatically create subtitles, based on a language model for the Flemish language area. With an increase in different forms of digital video content being created and published very quickly, current subtitling processes, which mainly use time-intensive and manual subtitling by professional subtitlers, are inadequate. Furthermore, the processes are difficult to scale cost-effectively and the implementation of qualitative (near) live subtitling is highly dependent on the use case.

Video content on social media needs a faster subtitling process than on television or on-demand platforms. Here, the emergence of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) via deep learning techniques offers new opportunities. However, most current systems based on artificial intelligence for ASR focus less on Dutch/Flemish, as these languages are not considered 'urgent' by providers. This is where this Flemish automatic subtitling project comes in.

This project has received funding from the Flemish government, as part of the digital transformation programme for the Flemish media sector.