English automatic captions and Amara

Hot take: automatic captions are not that cool – auto-magic captions are. Think about it for a second, you’ll get it. Let me help you out.

You have lots of stats all over the internet today talking about automatic captions and how cool they can be for accessibility and marketing reasons. I won’t deny that, I totally support it. However, what those stats tell us as well is that auto-captions are not ever 100% accurate. If you’re lucky, and you got a video with someone like Keanu Reeves speaking in it – you might get an accuracy rate of 80% (and even a 90% if it’s Halloween and some witchcraft is involved!). If you have a video with Trevor Noah doing his insanely cool accents from around the world – I feel like mentioning the accuracy rate for this one would be an insult to Noah’s out-of-this-world skill.

And if you don’t have time to watch the YouTube video, here’s some funny screenshots with even funnier automatic craptions. Enjoy! (And then go watch some Trevor Noah shows: it’s good for your health.)

Now, what is this auto-magic captions thing I’m conjuring here today? That’s Amara: joint creative energies in the support of accessibility, inclusion and belonging. Read on, I’ll get into details of how you can elevate your captioning to the auto-magic level.

1. Self-order of automatic captions from Amara

Fun part aside, Amara has the most innovative solution for the challenge of English speech recognition. And since we’re also full on fashion 2022, other languages like Spanish, French, German and Portuguese are on their way to our beautiful planet (slash Amara platform).

With an Amara Plus or Community team, anyone can self-order English automatic captions. We use a trusted speech recognition AI with an Amara fix for accuracy on top of it. But that’s not even the awesome part!

Do you know how we make it so you get the best final result? With your self-ordering of auto-captions, you also get an award-winning Captioning and Subtitling editor. After you get your auto captions delivered to your private team or workspace, you can use the editor to review and refine them on the spot. Or, you can have someone on your team do it! You have so many options with an Amara Plus or Community Team: because you also get a Team Management Platform included for your team. We’re really cool, join us! No really, do it. An Amara Plus Team starts at $24 per month for 2 seats. You can test it out, and if you don’t like it, you can cancel it before your month expires. But trust me, you’ll love it!

2. Amara editor to review automatic captions

We got some other solutions too. If you have your own auto-captions, you can also use Amara Plus or Amara Community to upload your .srt file (or about 10 other formats you can choose from. I’m a writer, not a tech person, so I’ll just link you to our support page where you can check all the supported formats. Don’t judge me, we all have our strengths!). 

Once uploaded, you can edit, review, add anything you need to your external auto-captions. Or again, you can have someone on your team do it. Which features of our paid teams you choose to use is up to you. Enjoy it!

3. Amara editor to translate into over 300+ languages

That’s not it though. Did I mention we’re really cool yet? If not, here it goes: Amara is real cool stuff! Once you have your automatic captions either from Amara or uploaded to Amara, and you have edited and refined them, you can also translate them into over 300 languages. Yep, you heard that right. We support that many languages on our platform and with our editor. You can also do some other cool stuff, like edit your characters per line or how long the subtitles are going to stay on the screen for any language you want. We, of course, provide you with all the best market standard guidelines, but we also respect and support individuality, so when you need to do your thing – do your thing, awesome human!

Another option you might want to explore is using auto-captions as a starting point for translation.

If ✓you don’t need English captions but you need subtitles in other languages for your videos, and 

✓you’re at the beginning of your journey in the video content creation world (your budget is stretched thin as it is!), 

✓you can also grab auto-captions and upload them to Amara, and 

✓then use them as support material to translate and subtitle videos in lots of languages. 

This is not a solution we would recommend long term, but it’s always an option if you need affordable ideas and need to make it happen now. Once your coolness gets out into the world and you get your thousands of followers, don’t forget about us. Go ahead and sign up for an Amara Community team so your followers can help you subtitle your videos into various languages and become even more popular around the globe!

4. Amara on Demand team to auto-caption, manually caption and translate videos

You thought I’m done now, didn’t you? Last one, pinky promise. We also got a special team called Amara On Demand. This is our team of expert translators from all over the world that can translate and subtitle your videos into over 50 languages. So here’s another cool solution for you: self-order automatic captions from Amara, edit and review them, and then also go ahead and self-order professional video translations and subtitles from our Amara on Demand team.

With Amara on Demand you can get captions in over 50 languages (oh I forgot, captions basically means same-language subtitles: you know, when you have an English video with English subtitles – those are called captions). And you can have the videos translated into over 50 languages as well. 

You can use what we like to call a hybrid solution, where you take advantage of all 3 main services we offer: Amara paid teams that gives you access to our editor and team management platform, our self-order ASR solution, and our Amara on Demand team. You can use one or all of them, it’s up to you.

Got any questions or want to talk more about automatic captions, subtitling, and translating videos? Shoot us an email at enterprise@amara.org and let’s have a fun, productive chat!