Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serries and today I explain to you why subtitles on videos have conquered the world.
Do you have a kid under 20? Well, watch him watch a video. At the bottom of its screen, you will definitely see subtitles there. And this is no exception. Yes, subtitles have become cool.
More and more viewers, especially the youngest, are using tools that transcribe content dialogues into writing. And that ranges from movies to short videos found on TikTok.
The use of subtitles has changed
Above all, the use of subtitles has changed. Until then, in France, subtitles were used to watch content in the original version, that is to say in a language other than that of the viewer.
Now everyone is using subtitles to watch videos in a language they fully understand, and the success of this feature goes beyond hearing-impaired people.
So why this new fashion, which it seems is here to stay? Well, it now seems essential to better understand audio, and especially to do several things at once. Clearly, subtitles allow viewers to better focus on what is happening on the screen at a time when attention span is drastically reduced.
AI enabled automatic captioning
It is therefore no coincidence that in recent years, Google has developed the automatic captioning options on devices.
But it is also the availability of subtitles which, by boomerang effect, leads to their consumption. For a long time, the work of creating subtitles was a long succession of manual tasks. This made the availability of subtitles very rare. But recently, artificial intelligence has allowed the distribution of automatic subtitles in applications such as YouTube, Facebook, TikTok or Instagram.
Netflix, for its part, offers in addition to the classic subtitles a description of the sound and colored subtitles during certain scenes.
Live Captions, to try on iOS
And the company confirms that the number of people accessing subtitles on the platform has more than doubled since 2017.
And for those who are looking for subtitles to help them better understand what is happening on the screen while they are in a noisy environment, such as public transport for example, one of the latest fashionable technologies just developed by Apple.
The Live Captions feature, available with MacOS Ventura and iOS 16, enables live transcription of any sound, whether during FaceTime calls, in a video streaming app, or simply picked up by the device’s microphone . You can find this feature in the Settings menu, then Accessibility.