this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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[–] TheImpressiveX@lemm.ee 65 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Et tu, Brute?

VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages!

Oh, so it's basically like YouTube's auto-generatedd subtitles. Never mind.

[–] neme@lemm.ee 47 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Hopefully better than YouTube's, those are often pretty bad, especially for non-English videos.

They are terrible.

[–] wazzupdog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They're awful for English videos too, IMO. Anyone with any kind of accent(read literally anyone except those with similar accents to the team that developed the auto-caption) it makes egregious errors, it's exceptionally bad with Australian, New Zealand, English, Irish, Scottish, Southern US, and North Eastern US. I'm my experience "using" it i find it nigh unusable.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 days ago

ELEVUHN
ELEVUHN

[–] moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Youtube's removal of community captions was the first time I really started to hate youtube's management, they removed an accessibility feature for no good reason, making my experience with it significantly worse. I still haven't found a replacement for it (at least, one that actually works)

[–] moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago

and if you are forced to use the auto-generated ones remember no [__] swearing either! as we all know disabled people are small children who need to be coddled!

[–] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Same here. It kick-started my hatred of YouTube, and they continued to make poor decision after poor decision.

[–] MoSal@lemm.ee 8 points 1 week ago

I've been working on something similar-ish on and off.

There are three (good) solutions involving open-source models that I came across:

  • KenLM/STT
  • DeepSpeech
  • Vosk

Vosk has the best models. But they are large. You can't use the gigaspeech model for example (which is useful even with non-US english) to live-generate subs on many devices, because of the memory requirements. So my guess would be, whatever VLC will provide will probably suck to an extent, because it will have to be fast/lightweight enough.

What also sets vosk-api apart is that you can ask it to provide multiple alternatives (10 is usually used).

One core idea in my tool is to combine all alternatives into one text. So suppose the model predicts text to be either "... still he ..." or "... silly ...". My tool can give you "... (still he|silly) ..." instead of 50/50 chancing it.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In my experiments, local Whisper models I can run locally are comparable to YouTube's — which is to say, not production-quality but certainly better then nothing.

I've also had some success cleaning up the output with a modest LLM. I suspect the VLC folks could do a good job with this, though I'm put off by the mention of cloud services. Depends on how they implement it.

[–] troed@fedia.io 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah I've used local whisper and LLMs to automatically summarize Youtube-videos and podcasts to text with good results.

https://github.com/troed/summarize.sh

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Cool, thanks for sharing!

I see you prompt it to "Make sure to only use knowledge found in the following audio transcription". Have you found that sufficient to eliminate hallucination and going off track?

[–] troed@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago

Yes I have been impressed with the quality of summaries keeping to the content. I have seen, rare, attribution errors though, where who said what got mixed up in unfortunate ways.