Best Way to Generate Subtitles?

Has anyone found a good way to generate auto subtitles? Ive heard of some of the sites and tried one for their trial and it was good but for me it was too much money to spend just to get subtitles. For context there is an old popular show from the 70s i want to watch but there is zero subtitles for it.

I tried HappyScribe quite a bit. It is just way too expensive though in my opinion, and your not even paying for a transcription that is 100 percent correct.

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Yea i used that one and it was nice and it helped a bit but not perfect. If it was maybe like $10 a month and you can use it as much as you want id be interested but yea too expensive.

Basically all of the “Big Tech” companies offer speech to text services (STT).
Google: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/
Microsoft: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-services/speech-to-text/
Facebook: wit.ai
Amazon: Amazon Transcribe – Speech to Text - AWS

They typically expect users to interact with an API, so a basic level of programming / scripting knowledge is helpful. But web interfaces exist, at least for AWS and Google. Still, the first step is always to upload the audio to the respective storage solution (e.g. S3). This involves a bit of clicking around but should be good enough for occasional use.

Personally I have been using AWS Transcribe for Chinese podcasts, I’m happy with the results. It sometimes struggles with names (esp. foreign ones) and when multiple people speak at the same time (doesn’t record anything). In general it helps to set the number of speakers option. AWS can output srt and/or vtt subtitle files, those can be imported into LingQ using the “import ebook” functionality, this doesn’t allow audio to be synced alongside however.

In general I would expect the quality of these services to be excellent, at least in the major languages. IIRC Google and Microsoft’s Chinese transcriptions were’t any worse than Amazon’s. Pricing should be comparable, but depends on region and currency. I only use Amazon because it is the most convenient for me.

Another service is https://www.iflyrec.com/ it is probably the most used service in Mainland China, it is supposedly excellent, but be aware that creating an account and especially payment can be challenging.

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I’ve gotten meeting transcripts by recording the meeting, uploading the file to Youtube, using the auto-generate subtitles function, and then finding the “show transcript” button in the function tab. It’s bit clunky but it’s free . . . .

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yess i tried this but for a tv show and they flagged it and banned it :frowning:

Ahh ok i was looking for a free option haha cause there is 300 episodes and another 3 different series related to it. but ill poke around with it thanks!

Sorry - I’ve never tried it with copywritten material. Does this happen when you keep the files private?

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Google the show’s title and include .srt / subtitles. You may get some good results. This works quite well for me and Japanese.

maybe you could try this site.

I haven’t tried it, but they give the option to convert 8 hours of video into subtitles and voice and also translate them. The service is provided in many languages. The example they show on the site is impressive. The price is 10 dollars per month.

I also saw this site.

I haven’t tried it also but they have less functions for the same price.

Sorry I was wrong. Payment at https://maestrasuite.com/
is $10 per hour (there are more plans). It is much more expensive.

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yup!

yuppp

I use this program it’s not perfect but it’s free.
pyTranscriber

This explains how to use it

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OpenAI released their opensource Whisper transcribing tool that does this very well.

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There are a lot of resources on writing, go online.

You can try google docs voice typing feature (found under “tools”). Set it to the language you’re trying to capture. It will capture over the mic so you need relative silence around. Probably works best for very clear and distinct voice (i.e. something with singular voice and little background noise going on).

I’ve not had a huge amount of luck with this during very limited experimentation. It usually works ok to start, but then stops at some point, but possibly I have some extensions that interfere or my usual 100,000 tabs open or something hogging resources. I generally don’t have use for it anyway so I haven’t tried it much.

This suggestion is from noxialisrex who has said it’s worked pretty good for him in the past.

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BTW, after a little more playing around, it looks like ublock extension may have been affecting this. I turned it off and it appears to be picking up everything pretty nicely…even with fair amounts of background noise (like in a news reports). Only bad thing is there’s no punctuation.

Thank you. Does it support Farsi language and generate subtitles from YouTube movies? What is the maximum movie length?

Yes, it support Farsi language.
What is the maximum movie length?
I really don’t know

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