In an interview with the technology website “The Verge”, through its Decoder on Monday (26), Crunchyroll president Rahul Puriniconfirmed that the company is testing the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
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Crunchyroll's president confirms testing with Artificial Intelligence
Therefore, Purini confirms tests of generative AI applied to subtitle and transcription texts. He comments that the tests are efforts to "optimize processes" allowing for the release of subtitles in more languages closer to the Japanese release date.
In addition to subtitles, the company is also testing generative artificial intelligence to help users personalize their experience and discover titles.
Here's a translated excerpt from the interview:
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something we think about in several different workflows within the organization. Right now, one of the areas we are very focused on testing is in subtitling and transcription, where we go from speech to text and how we can improve and optimize our processes so that we can subtitle in multiple languages around the world more quickly, and thus be able to launch as close as possible to the Japanese launch. So that is definitely an area we are focusing on.”.
"Dubbing, not so much yet, for a few reasons. Our dubbing tends to be adapted, not direct translations. So it's a creative process. We have teams that focus on adapting the voices for each region. We also have the fact that we need to dub and we can't edit the animation itself, so we have to figure out how to get the lip-sync right. So it's definitely something we're 'playing around with'. We don't think the technology is ready yet, but obviously we're also working on other areas, like personalization and discovery, and how we can use generative AI to make that experience better for our users. So yes, we're testing AI in several different areas of the organization.".
Previously, Crunchyroll released low-quality subtitles for the first episode of the anime The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons in October 2023, but ended up re-uploading the episode after complaints about the subtitles spread on social media and on Crunchyroll's own website. However, the platform re-uploaded the episode with updated subtitles after a week, explaining that they "worked with licenses from the series" for the updated subtitles.
Finally, Funimation Global 's Sony completed its acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T on August 9, 2021, after the company announced the acquisition in December 2020. The purchase price was US$1.175 billion, and the amount was paid in cash at closing.
Furthermore, Funimation's releases are now listed on Crunchyroll.
Comment below what you think of this new feature on the platform.
Source: TheVerge