Video has become the new norm medium of learning, communication and leisure through the advent of online content. However, millions are left out of video content, particularly the deaf and the hard of hearing. Subtitles are essential to making the videos inclusive to enable more individuals to view the content without limitation.
Who Benefits from Subtitles?
Subtitles are employed to help an extensive group that goes well beyond the hearing impaired. People viewing videos in noisy situations, learners learning a new language and even students having difficulty understanding complex concepts are all easier to understand with the help of good-quality subtitles. Investigations done by the communications regulator for the UK, Ofcom, found that 80% of the users of subtitles are not hearing impaired, illustrating the wide range of the benefit. Subtitled videos are also shown to increase viewer retention to the tune of 12%, making them valuable to providers of the content.
Subtitled programs also promote literacy. Research has shown that children watching programs that are captioned are more likely to be skilled readers than children watching programs that are not captioned. The “Turn On the Subtitles” campaign has promoted this technique based upon research that has proven that watching programs that are captioned improves the comprehension of readers, especially young readers.
The Role of Technology in Subtitle Creation
Creating subtitles manually is labor-intensive and prone to human error but becoming increasingly efficient through the use of automation. A subtitle generator for videos automates the transcription process using artificial intelligence to capture the speech and convert it to text. The tools are efficient enough to speed the process but provide greater precision if used along with the hand-edited process to tweak. Real-time captioning can also be achieved using the tools, which proves helpful during live broadcasting and virtual events.
AI subtitling has evolved a great deal from the early days. The early speech recognition programs used to produce erroneous and sometimes comical transcripts. But natural language processing and machine learning advances have taken the accuracy rate to new heights. The best AI-powered subtitling tools are now claiming to be more than 90 percent accurate under ideal situations, making them a viable option for creators who want quick and precise subtitling.
Promoting Understanding and Engagement
Captions reinforce spoken information through visual support to help viewers understand and remember. Research done by the Journal of Special Education Technology showed that learners watching instructional videos that contained captions achieved 35% higher test scores regarding understanding than learners watching captionless videos. This advantage extends to professional training videos, explanation videos and movies, where the use of subtitles can help to clarify dialogue and keep viewers engaged.
Furthermore, several video-sharing platforms and streaming portals have shown greater watch times if there are subtitles. As per a study done by Verizon Media, 80% of the customers will watch the full video if there are captions. With the consumption of the content becoming more mobile and the viewers watching the videos with the audio off, the use of subtitles ensures the message comes through.
The Influence of Subtitles on Universal Access
Videos are no longer limited to a region or a language. Subtitles enable the creators to open doors to a larger audience through the use of translated words for global viewers. Netflix has cited that 78% of global viewers watch the content with subtitles or captions. This feature has made global hit series like Squid Game possible, showing that the use of subtitles can overcome the boundaries of languages and appeal to a global viewership.
Numerous companies have also used subtitles to penetrate non-English-speaking marketplaces. Online learning platforms, for instance, experienced an uptick in international enrollment through the use of multilingual subtitles. The largest online learning platform, Coursera, indicated that approximately 50% of the courses are subtitled in one other language, dramatically expanding the accessibility and completion rate of the courses amongst global learners.
SEO Benefits of Accurate Subtitles
Having subtitles does more than promote accessibility—it also makes the content easier to find online. Search engines can crawl subtitle files, making the videos searchable through keyword searches. Studies show that videos that include subtitles receive 15% more view time because the information is more engaging and easier to find. This comes especially in handy to entrepreneurs and creatives who are looking to grow their viewership. Platforms such as YouTube use captions to allow automated translation, further growing the viewership of a video.
Furthermore, transcriptions and subtitles create the possibility to reuse the content. The same video can be reused to create a blog entry, a script for a podcast or social clips. This multi-channel strategy makes the content more available to a larger audience and offers the best possible return on investment to both the businesses and the creators.
Overcoming the Subtitle Accuracy Challenge
Regardless of the improvements made to automated subtitling, there are issues. Background noise, dense accents and professional jargon can lead to inaccuracies in AI-created captions. Even the best speech recognition programs can fail to understand some dialects, making manual correction a necessity. Most AI subtitle programs enable users to control the formatting of the text, include speaker identification and correct any errors before the subtitles are finalized to produce a professional-looking end product.
