AI Subtitling Market Is Exploding — That Doesn’t Mean Your Job Is Safe

However, if you do it right you will find a big opportunity

When I published my first book on Amazon during the lockdown, many friends advised me to publish it in at least two more languages. I considered it but gave up when I discovered the cost, time, and effort involved.

But today, two years later things are different. A slew of inexpensive tools make the translation super fast, nearly perfect, and almost free. Of course, for publication purposes, you will still need a human editor to oversee the final output but the effort is a small fraction of what it used to be.

Here I am talking about something slightly different — sub-titling. Sub-titling refers to the process of adding written textual translations or transcriptions at the bottom of a video screen.

This was traditionally the job of multi-lingual experts or translators. You will find them everywhere -mostly attached to publishing houses, offering services in English-Japanese, French-Mandarin, Polish -Arabic and so on. And they charge per character or per word, and sometimes per page of text. That job is now on the line.

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” — Bill Gates

Why is sub-titling important? What is triggering this service?

Firstly online video consumption is already a third of all video consumption globally (with an average person watching 6 hours and 48 minutes of video per week). Studies show:

Video consumption (viewing time) goes up about 40% with sub-titles

50% of users use video titles most of the time.

Increase accessibility of videos.

Boosts customer engagement, and satisfaction, enters new markets, creates new audiences, breathes new life into old content.

As more video editing tools came about to address a booming video content market, it became a natural enhancement to bring in sub-titling as a feature. Now there are full-stack AI-based sub-titling tools, that also perform translations, and offer the entire translated script downloadable as a text file, for you to fine-tune and upload back to the video content in minutes. And all this at a fraction of the cost just two years ago.

Nova.ai, Maestra, SubtitleBee, Subtitles.ai, and media.io are popular products in this category. Subscene, Descript, Wavel.ai, Rev.ai, Happy Scribe, and a few others are all making an impact in this global market.

Most of them offer speech-to-text, translation, subtitles, voiceovers, and advanced text editors, automated in minutes for a fee ranging from a few dollars per short video to $55 a month for full-blown service including storage and dozens of languages supported.

Multi-language multi-culture nations have more complex challenges

Dubverse.ai is an Indian AI startup that provides AI-powered video dubbing and subtitling services. Dubverse.ai’s platform can generate subtitles in over 30 Indian and global languages, and it can dub videos into multiple languages in real-time.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” — Peter Drucker

Dubverse.ai’s services are used by a variety of customers, including content creators, businesses, and educational institutions. For example, content creators can use Dubverse.ai to subtitle their videos for a global audience, and businesses can use Dubverse.ai to dub their marketing and training videos into multiple languages.

Banva.io is another Indian language subtitle generator and editor tool (browser-based) currently supporting 50 languages. India has an official list of over 22 languages and over 600 dialects used by its 1.4 billion people and video/audio content is made in almost 70% of them. Think of what a massive market that must be in terms of conversion, translation, editing, subtitling, and variants that need to be supported. This is why these local language expert products have an edge in this market.

Not surprisingly both Banva.io and Dubverse.ai raised growth capital in the last few months to strengthen their teams as work is pouring onto their desk not just globally but also from production houses such as Sony and OTT producers.

According to a report by Market Research Future, the global market for AI-powered subtitle generation is expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2027. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% from 2022 to 2027. From Valuates Reports, the market for India is much smaller though at about $300 mil (2021) growing to about $500 mil by 2028.

AI tool is not a silver bullet

It is important to note that AI tools for subtitle generation are not a silver bullet. They can generate subtitles quickly and accurately, but they cannot replace the expertise of human translators. For complex or nuanced content, it is still important to hire a human translator to ensure that the subtitles are accurate and culturally appropriate.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Socrates

As stated earlier, for culturally diverse markets these nuances may make the difference between a criminal offense and jail term. Some language nuances are so intricate that even experts are baffled and need advice. In India, between some dialects, the script and spelling read the same but have to be read and interpreted differently based on context. These make it impossible for a machine to read this and express it right.

If you are a subtitle and editing expert, then what?

Speed and accuracy are likely to go up for the mainstream translation and subtitling services market with these tools. As a result, new job creation may suffer. However, if you are an experienced subtitling, translation expert, or editor, now is the time for you to quickly upgrade, become familiar with some of these tools, and champion their usage instead of battling them.

By using these AI tools, you will be able to triple or quadruple your productivity, offer more services, support more languages, and grow your client base wider and more profitable in the process. The key is how you look at this — embrace or avoid. If you embrace tech, you will grow. If you resist, you will perish.

Content Markets just Realized a new growth tool from within

AI tools for subtitle generation are a positive development for the content industry. They are making it easier and more affordable for content creators to subtitle their content, and they are making movies and TV shows more accessible to a wider audience.

You must embrace this change and grow further. Otherwise, you will not only miss this opportunity but all the future opportunities this engine will trigger.

Sridhar Pai Tonse writes about life, tech, markets, and startups. He is an expert on Strategy and Lead Generation for startups. Follow him on https://youtube.com/@tonsepai and visit https://tonsepai.com. For more https://tonsetelecom.com.