Microsoft is rolling out a new accessibility feature for PowerPoint, one that stands to help speakers ensure their presentations are understood by their entire audience. The company notes that in cases where audience members are hard of hearing or sp...
Be careful before you fire up media player software to play that foreign-language movie -- it might be a way for intruders to compromise your system. Check Point researchers have discovered an exploit that uses maliciously crafted subtitles to take c...
Netflix supports over 20 languages, many of which aren't dubbed, so subtitles are often the only way for foreign viewers to follow the plot. While the streaming company holds itself to a high standard, the internet abounds with tales of wonky transla...
In a bid to make its programming more accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired viewers, the BBC has launched a new trial that will bring subtitles to live channels on iPlayer. It's the first time any major on-demand video service has embarked on such...
Last year we featured Captioning on Glass, an application that uses Google Glass and an Android device to translate speech to text in real time. Now a group of teenagers claim they can provide us with a device that has the same capabilities.
Frants Innovators’Live Time Closed Captioning System (LTCCS) is an augmented reality system powered by the Raspberry Pi. Its display is designed to be mounted on eyeglasses, while the Pi and the rest of the components are in a pocketable case.
The company claims that they’ve already made the display and that their software works, but they’re still refining their system: “What we still have to do is perfect it. Ideally, we want to make a system that works in any situation. Obviously making it work in absolutely any situation is impossible, but what is possible is making it work well enough that you never encounter the situation in which it doesn’t.”
You can pledge at least $650 (USD) on Indiegogo to receive an LTCCS as a reward, though I suggest you wait until Frants Innovators can present more concrete proof of their product.
One of the things I always wondered about Star Wars is exactly what was R2-D2 saying when he was beeping away excitedly. He spoke some sort of beepy robot language that only C-3P0 seemed to fully understand. Why didn’t they just give him subtitles like Jabba?
I think R2 would be a snarky little robot, sort of like a robotic version of Deadpool. A video has turned up in which Eclectic Method has taken R2’s beeps and subtitled them over some scenes from the classic original trilogy and the new films.
Turns out, at least in this translation, that R2 is an impertinent little guy. He also doesn’t think that Luke is the best pilot in the galaxy. Watch the video for yourself to see what R2-D2 has to say.
Earlier this year we saw a project where Google Glass was used to project an interpreter for deaf students. A team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with a more immediate solution for people that are hard of hearing. Using an Android app, the researchers’ software sends a text translation of speech in real time.
Called Captioning on Glass, the Glass app receives text via Bluetooth from a companion Android app, which uses the Android translation API to convert speech. Even though Glass already has a microphone, the researchers chose to include an Android device in the process because it makes it easier for the person speaking to figure out where to talk. The noise reduction on most smartphones helps with the conversion as well.
Google Glass owners can download Captioning on Glass here. The researchers are also planning on making a similar app but for translating from one language to another. Perhaps they can get in touch with Will Powell, who already did just that with his DIY augmented reality glasses two years ago.
Apparently, Netflix pulledStar Trek III: The Search for Spock from its instant streaming service. The company has had much criticism over errors in the way it’s streaming movies, especially the subtitles. Specifically, they pulled The Search for Spock to correct the Vulcan and Klingon subtitles. Apparently, the film had been streaming with English dubbing over the alien languages, but the service will reinstate the original audio and supplement it with English subtitles. But not the ones from the original DVDs – Netflix will use their own subtitles instead, ensuring the accuracy of the Klingon-to-English and Vulcan-to-English translations. I think they must be finished correcting them already, because I am able to pull up the movie on Netflix, though I don’t have the time to watch it right now.
This seems pretty stupid. The subtitles are already on the DVDs. I guess the folks at Netflix have some spare time on their hands.
When Plexrolled out its PlexPass subscription that offered paying customers access to some new features as they were being developed, a new web client was first in line. Now an update to its Media Server is available that brings it to all users, along with a slew of other fixes and tweaks including improved photo access, transcoder management and increased subtitle support over DLNA. If you are on PlexPass however, now that the Plex/Web feature has escaped over the paywall the blog post teases a "mystery feature" set to debut tomorrow. Hit the source link for the full changelog and instructions on how to access everything.
Update: The new PlexPass-exclusive feature is "PlexSync", that lets users flag content in their library to be automatically reformatted and loaded on their iOS (or Android, soon) device. There's several filters included to manage what content gets sideloaded plus APIs for developers, check the new blog post for more details.
Amazon is finally catching up to the rest of the streaming industry and adding closed captions to some of its Instant Video selections. For the moment the library of CCed content is pretty slim, with only 169 shows and 74 movies, but we'd expect that to grow pretty quickly. That does put the burgeoning media giant quite a bit behind competitors like Hulu and Netflix, who have been catering to the hearing impaired for some time. For now, captions are only available when streaming from Amazon's website, but the company promises to expand support to "additional devices" soon. For more info check out the Amazon help page at the source and the email notice forwarded to us by a tipster after the break.
Microsoft is rolling out a new accessibility feature for PowerPoint, one that stands to help speakers ensure their presentations are understood by their entire audience. The company notes that in cases where audience members are hard of hearing or sp...
Be careful before you fire up media player software to play that foreign-language movie -- it might be a way for intruders to compromise your system. Check Point researchers have discovered an exploit that uses maliciously crafted subtitles to take c...
Netflix supports over 20 languages, many of which aren't dubbed, so subtitles are often the only way for foreign viewers to follow the plot. While the streaming company holds itself to a high standard, the internet abounds with tales of wonky transla...
In a bid to make its programming more accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired viewers, the BBC has launched a new trial that will bring subtitles to live channels on iPlayer. It's the first time any major on-demand video service has embarked on such...
