Tech site The Verge recently spoke with the president of Crunchyroll Rahul Purini in a long and wide-ranging interview for his show Decoded. At the end of the conversation, Purini addressed the company’s considerations for AI and said that captioning is “one of the areas” where testing is being done.
“AI is definitely something we think about a lot across different workflows within the organization,” Purini said. “Right now, one of the areas we’re focusing our testing on is subtitles and closed captioning, where we go from speech to text and how we improve and optimize the process to Subtitles can be completed in many different languages around the world. faster so we can launch as close to the Japanese release date as possible. So that’s definitely an area we’re focusing on.”
The answer is to answer Nick Statt of The Verge asked whether Crunchyroll is “thinking about” technologies like “potentially AI” for subtitles and dubbing. Just before that, the two talked about the Crunchyroll service that is best at attracting paying customers, with Purini replying “streaming and early access to shows from Japan with subtitles and dubbing.”
“I think that’s it, the biggest thing,” Purini said. “The sooner we can get it to them, the easier it is for us to get it to them — both in terms of how they want to watch the movie, regardless of what subtitle language it’s dubbed in — has been the biggest driver for switching change everyone. Because pirated websites provide that content as soon as possible, but most of that content is only in some languages, maybe not the one they want. Sometimes they don’t have a dub. So if we can do that consistently and as quickly as possible, I think that’s the biggest opportunity we have.”
Purini doesn’t think AI is good enough for voiceover work, but reveals that Crunchyroll is “focusing on other areas like personalization and discovery and how we can use generative AI to deliver experiences better experience for users.”
Earlier in the interview, Purini told Statt that the localization aspect of Crunchyroll is one of the company’s biggest group aspects “because we don’t just take this content in Japanese audio and sub We’ve dubbed it into more than 10 languages, and we’ve also dubbed that content into more than 10 languages. So we have teams focused on localization and we do that internally in most of our territories.”
Last October, Crunchyroll received criticism for the subtitle quality of the first series The Four Sons of the Yuzuki Family. episode, with some accusing the streaming platform of using machine translation. The situation is so bad that Crunchyroll told Anime News Network that it is working with the anime’s licensors “to update the subtitles” and then reupload the episode with new subtitles.
Source: The brink