Same-time Sub-titles

Archie Campbell’s peatcutting skills and lore – well-known to Island Voices followers – were given a sparkling fresh polish in the progress report from the Gaelic Automatic Speech Recognition project being led by Will Lamb – another Island Voices veteran.

While the overall aim of the project is more ambitious still, the new Gaelic audio alignment tool was unveiled as a step along the way, using videos from our Series 2 collections, particularly featuring the ever-popular Peatcutting documentary plus the talking head interview clips of Archie talking about the work and associated social customs.

Will’s tweet shows a short sample clip.

Example of the new #Gaelic audio alignment tool here, which takes a script and automatically time stamps it against an audio recording. Voila – automatic subtitles! (Prize for anyone who guesses what Archie is talking about😉)

How we did it: https://t.co/qpIs54kT1G pic.twitter.com/ds3ZaTb7Lo

— Dr Will Lamb 🌱 (@UilleamUan) January 29, 2021

But you can see the videos in full (plus another documentary sample looking at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig) by following this link. (Clips 724-726 for the peatcutting, 746 for SMO.)

This raises an interesting question for Island Voices, going forward. We’ve generally avoided adding sub-titles to our videos – with some specific exceptions – though we have made a point of supplying scrollable read-along Clilstore transcripts in almost all cases. This latest innovation suggests on-screen same-time sub-titles may be about to become an additional option – for our Gaelic films at least. What do our followers think of that?