Automatic Closed Captions For Facebook Live Using AI

Oops! Facebook has done it again. It has again innovated its processes and come up with something amazing using the latest technology.

What are we talking about?

We are talking about automatic closed captioning. Yes! That’s right! Now Facebook Live videos will have automatic closed captions thanks to Facebook AI (Artificial Intelligence). This means that Facebook live videos are now more accessible to millions of people. People who didn’t understand the videos before, can now fully understand them. This has been done with Facebook Live and Workplace Live. You too can leverage the power of AI and utilize AI consulting services to innovate your business and bring in more crowds.

Increase In Video Content Demand

Even before Covid-19 hit, we saw a huge demand for video content on Facebook and other channels. After the pandemic, this demand has risen tremendously. More and more people are following their favourite media channels for entertainment and public health information. They continuously stream news channels and live conferences. As compared to last year, the number of Facebook Live broadcasts have more than doubled.

Facebook has been continuously upgrading its Artificial Intelligence solutions, whether we talk about chatbots or automated speech recognition (ASR). The automatic closed captions are another step in the process. Now, healthcare officials and government officials can easily disseminate crucial and latest information and make sure that everybody understands the message. This is also a milestone for people with hearing impairments as they will also be able to view the Live videos and conferences.

If a business has multiple staff members from multiple backgrounds, they can use automatic close captions to ensure that all the employees get the message. Right now, Facebook has integrated support for six languages, namely:

– English
– Spanish
– Portuguese
– Italian
– German, and
– French.

Let us remind you that closed captioning is not a new technology. It has been around since late 2000s. People have been trying to predict words in an audio file and display them as they are spoken. But it was always a difficult task. IT was even more difficult if there was a dialogue going on. This means that sometimes people might not speak clearly or sometimes they would speak over each other. Other common issues that occur are background noise as well as various accents and tones of the speakers.

What Facebook engineers have done is to come up with a number of optimizations. These optimizations take care of all these issues with livestream audio. Another thing that they have done is to reduce the compute. This is a great innovation as we all know that the live-stream puts a lot of load on compute.

Conclusion

The system is still not perfect and there is a lot to be done. There are various AI strategy services that they can provide if they work on the system like recognizing various types of speech and recognizing different accents. But, it is amazing nonetheless and we can definitely expect it to get better with time.

Also Read: Top 6 Examples Of Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare Industry