Microsoft has helped Africa’s leading video entertainment company, MultiChoice, to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make video captioning, subtitling and translations faster and more efficient.
The AI project has slashed the time it takes editors to transcribe content and create subtitles, and positions MultiChoice to make its content accessible to more viewers across the continent.
With 21.8 million customers across 50 countries, MultiChoice uses captioning as an important tool to enable accessibility of its content for customers with hearing difficulties, and to make its content available to more countries outside of South Africa.
However, manual transcription and captioning processes were becoming too slow and costly in the face of increasing volumes of content and ever-tighter deadlines.
MultiChoice internal teams faced a major challenge with manual subtitle creation due to large volumes of content and quick turnaround times needed to broadcast the content and subtitles for viewers. Captioning is a three-step process: first,editors transcribe the audio; then the dialogues are timed onto the video; and finally hearing-impaired attributes are added to the subtitle file. When carried out manually, a 45-minute show might have taken teams two days to process manually.
MultiChoice sought a speech to text solution to optimise workflows and improve turnaround time. However, few solutions addressed the company’s key challenges: achieving a high level of accuracy with South African accents and dialects; and enabling processing either on-premise or in the cloud.
Security and the ability to process the content on-premise was necessary because of strict conditions around sensitive international content. A secondary business challenge was to find cost efficient ways to translate subtitles into other languages to help MultiChoice localize content for other markets within Africa.
“leaders in Africa with this type of technology. We are really trying to empower our staff to find more efficient ways of working, which eventually leads to a better customer experience”
Nishen Naicker, Principal AI Product Manager, MultiChoice
“Having this type of collaboration on the ground with MultiChoice, getting real ‘ground truth’ information in a real location and providing that feedback back into the organisation really helps, because we can fine tune these models and continue to improve upon them.”
Kunda Chaikatisha, Cloud Solution Architect, MultiChoice
MultiChoice already enjoyed a close relationship with Microsoft and posed these challenges to the Microsoft team. In close collaboration, an effective AI-powered solution was developed, tested and deployed.
The solution was codenamed “ODIN” after the wise Norse god of war and – appropriately – poetry. The solution is based on the Microsoft Azure stack utilizing Microsoft Speech to Text Models to automate subtitle creation at an acceptable accuracy of 85%. Both Microsoft cloud Speech to Text services are utilised, as well as Microsoft on-premise Speech containers for the more sensitive content. The solution also utilises Microsoft’s latest language support for South African voices (en-za) which has a high level of accuracy to support local content with South African accents
A workflow was created to allow operational teams to easily interface with cloud and on-premise speech to text capability and produce subtitle files in SRT/STL format. The solution also utilises Microsoft Teams to notify status of speech to text process to keep operational teams notified on progress. Using a hub and spoke model, MultiChoice has positioned its shared services at the hub, with each spoke representing a new use case added to the framework.
The solution has optimised the first two steps of captioning – automatically transcribing the audio and automatically timing the dialogues to the video, cutting processing time in half. It has also paved the way for content to be translated cost-effectively for other markets.
MultiChoice sees further use cases for the solution, including addressing the challenge of captioning content that contains more than one language: such as South African shows which include English and Afrikaans.
The company aims to evolve the solution to automatically identify languages and deal with multilingualism in content.The ODIN project enhances MultiChoice’s efforts to accelerate its AI deployments to improve efficiency and empower staff,ultimately to deliver a better customer experience.
“The solution was easily extended to include the translation of subtitles into other languages by utilising the Microsoft Translation service. The first language supported was Portuguese, using the latest released translation models from Microsoft to support the Angolan and Mozambican markets. A workflow was created on Azure to allow operational teams to interface with translation services and translate to any intended languages supported by Azure. We had very demanding requirements: we needed a highly accurate solution for the South African context; we needed the ability to process content in the cloud as well as on-premise; and all content had to be secure. We found that Microsoft had the best offering for us.”
Nishen Naicker, Principal AI Product Manager, MultiChoice
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