0:00:05.171,0:00:08.751 ERIC: So we're here in Google Plus Hangout on the air. 0:00:08.751,0:00:11.835 I'm Eric Mack, managing editor of Crowdsourcing.org, 0:00:11.835,0:00:16.667 and also, in the hangout, we've got Nicholas Reville, 0:00:16.667,0:00:20.168 who is co-founder and executive director of Amara 0:00:20.168,0:00:24.919 and before we talk about what we're doing here today, maybe to get us started, 0:00:24.919,0:00:28.537 Nicholas, explain a little bit about what Amara is and what you guys do. 0:00:28.537,0:00:31.167 NICHOLAS: Sure. Nice to be here. 0:00:31.167,0:00:37.501 Uh... So, Amara.org is a subtitling, captioning - subtitling and captioning platform, 0:00:37.501,0:00:41.537 and what really makes it unique, I think, is that we're really knocking down 0:00:41.537,0:00:44.504 a bunch of the barriers that make captions and subtitles 0:00:44.504,0:00:48.038 so difficult to create and so rare for online video. 0:00:48.038,0:00:53.501 And, so, we have what I think is the easiest to use and I hope most enjoyable 0:00:53.501,0:00:56.213 subtitling interface anywhere. 0:00:56.213,0:00:57.971 We're also compatible with lots of sites. 0:00:57.971,0:01:01.369 You can bring your YouTube video, Vimeo video, HTML file, 0:01:01.369,0:01:04.001 DailyMotion video, to our site, 0:01:04.001,0:01:05.309 add captions and subtitles. 0:01:05.309,0:01:11.069 But, most importantly, we're making it possible for a lot of people 0:01:11.069,0:01:14.438 to collaboratively work on creating captions and subtitles, 0:01:14.438,0:01:23.373 and we think that the only way that you can get captioning and subtitling done on thousands and millions of web videos 0:01:23.373,0:01:28.906 is if you ask the viewers to participate, and we think it is really a Wikipedia-type problem - 0:01:28.906,0:01:34.307 something that's so huge in scale and requires so much distributed expertise 0:01:34.307,0:01:38.871 that we need to bring people from around the world 0:01:38.871,0:01:41.168 in to help make video accessible. 0:01:41.168,0:01:48.168 And we got started because we were looking at online video, looking at web video, 0:01:48.168,0:01:53.607 and realising how important captions and subtitles were for people that have access, 0:01:53.607,0:01:59.804 and yet, how rare they were. And, so, right now, we work with a bunch of education companies 0:01:59.804,0:02:04.336 and I can talk more about that - but they're creating videos of educational courses 0:02:04.336,0:02:06.938 and sending those around the world for peple to watch. 0:02:06.938,0:02:10.104 But, if you don't speak English, you need a way to have... 0:02:10.104,0:02:13.469 You need a way to watch, you need a way to understand that. 0:02:13.469,0:02:18.136 Um, and Amara makes that possible by inviting viewers, by inviting students, 0:02:18.136,0:02:24.475 to help translate the videos into dozens and over a hundred languages. 0:02:24.475,0:02:30.335 ERIC: So, yeah, I mean it's global crowd-sourcing of kind of the, you know, real-time news culture 0:02:30.335,0:02:33.874 that is becoming more and more prevalent, worldwide. 0:02:33.874,0:02:40.438 And, it strikes me as something that is particularly useful in this age of, of things like the Arab Spring 0:02:40.438,0:02:47.271 where there's things going on in other parts of the world that affect Americans, affect people all over the world 0:02:47.271,0:02:50.871 but we're not necessarily sharing language with those places 0:02:50.871,0:02:54.278 And I wonder if maybe you could give a couple -- other examples 0:02:54.278,0:02:59.605 of, uh, places where Amara has already been put to good use 0:02:59.605,0:03:03.168 I know you've done some -- the State of the Union Address, I think 0:03:03.168,0:03:05.971 was one place, uh, where Amara's been really useful 0:03:05.971,0:03:09.900 can you give us any other, uh, use cases, any other success stories? 0:03:09.976,0:03:12.759 NICHOLAS: Sure. So, the Arab Spring is a great example, 0:03:12.789,0:03:15.302 in that we saw a whole bunch of usage then, 0:03:15.302,0:03:17.603 videos going into and out of Arabic 0:03:17.603,0:03:20.337 and a whole bunch of countries during that time. 0:03:20.337,0:03:26.132 During the Japanese earthquake, we had a really, really interesting video. 0:03:26.132,0:03:28.883 There were a whole bunch of videos going in and out of Japanese 0:03:28.883,0:03:33.466 but, we noticed that there was one video 0:03:33.466,0:03:37.635 on our site that was getting watched hundreds of thousands of times 0:03:37.635,0:03:40.104 it was being shared on Twitter dozens of times a minute. 0:03:40.104,0:03:46.504 And it had been translated, just from English into Japanese by one person. 0:03:46.504,0:03:49.903 There weren't even -- it wasn't even transcribed in English at first 0:03:49.903,0:03:55.267 and it turned out to be a documentary on that was on YouTube 0:03:55.267,0:03:58.049 that had been produced 20 or 25 years ago 0:03:58.049,0:04:04.604 about Chernobyl, and about the aftermath of Chernobyl in Russia, 0:04:04.604,0:04:11.201 and it was of sudden, of urgent, as you can imagine, relevance to people in Japan, after the earthquake 0:04:11.201,0:04:13.800 in dealing with their own nuclear crisis. 0:04:13.800,0:04:16.550 So, that was a great example of a community 0:04:16.550,0:04:20.335 that really, urgently needed a piece of information 0:04:20.335,0:04:23.070 it wasn't even - it wasn't even new news 0:04:23.070,0:04:26.737 But it was something that was urgently relevant 0:04:26.737,0:04:31.843 and they were able to get it into their language and then share it as they were trying to come to terms with what was happening. 0:04:31.843,0:04:34.835 And, in a more real time sense, 0:04:34.835,0:04:38.768 we've seen things like the Kony 2012 video 0:04:38.768,0:04:41.632 which was a very controversial, but also extremely popular 0:04:41.632,0:04:46.570 activism video at the beginning of 2012 0:04:46.570,0:04:51.268 that was translated on our site into more than 20 languages 0:04:51.268,0:04:52.737 in just two days 0:04:52.737,0:04:56.537 because it was being shared so quickly and so widely 0:04:56.537,0:04:58.887 and people wanted to watch it everywhere. 0:04:58.887,0:05:03.506 ERIC: So the reason that, um, I wanted to speak with you today, 0:05:03.506,0:05:06.673 is, just recently you've launched this app, I suppose 0:05:06.673,0:05:09.874 that plugs into YouTube 0:05:09.874,0:05:15.938 and allows for anyone, uh, to, you know, join the team 0:05:15.938,0:05:17.052 so to speak 0:05:17.052,0:05:20.838 and translate and captain any video on YouTube. 0:05:20.838,0:05:22.767 Is that right? Am I describing it right? Is that how it works? 0:05:22.767,0:05:25.300 NICHOLAS: Yeah that's pretty close to right. 0:05:25.300,0:05:27.132 So, this month we launched 0:05:27.132,0:05:29.504 major, new capability 0:05:29.504,0:05:30.965 and essentially, 0:05:30.965,0:05:33.012 if you have a YouTube channel 0:05:33.012,0:05:35.410 if you have a personal YouTube channel, 0:05:35.410,0:05:38.215 you can connect your YouTube account 0:05:38.215,0:05:39.737 to Amara.org. 0:05:39.737,0:05:43.003 Takes about, 5 seconds to enable that, 0:05:43.003,0:05:49.268 and then, we will add a link on your videos for people to contribute captions and subtitles 0:05:49.268,0:05:54.738 and when those are finished, they will get synced back, um, right into your YouTube channel. 0:05:54.738,0:05:56.237 So if you have a video that's getting popular 0:05:56.237,0:05:57.965 and you invite your viewers to translate it, 0:05:57.965,0:06:01.633 you can have subtitles on that video in, you know, 0:06:01.633,0:06:03.770 a dozen language very, very quickly. 0:06:03.770,0:06:05.217 And that's part of our vision here 0:06:05.217,0:06:08.571 is that anything that gets popular -- any video that gets popular 0:06:08.571,0:06:10.800 we want it to be accessible around the world 0:06:10.800,0:06:12.967 we want people to be able to watch it everywhere 0:06:12.967,0:06:14.771 wherever they are. 0:06:14.771,0:06:19.271 So if you have a YouTube channel, it's a really easy way to enable that to happen. 0:06:19.271,0:06:21.299 And that's something that we've been doing for a few months 0:06:21.299,0:06:24.667 even before this launch, with companies and organizations. 0:06:24.667,0:06:30.943 So, Twitter, for example, used Amara, in -- at the beginning of the winter 0:06:30.943,0:06:33.383 to launch their photo filters feature 0:06:33.383,0:06:35.071 their new mobile photo filters feature 0:06:35.071,0:06:38.338 they created a launch video for that. 0:06:38.338,0:06:43.383 And they translated it into 20 languages before they released it 0:06:43.383,0:06:46.167 and then, um, when they made the annoucement 0:06:46.167,0:06:53.608 that video was used in all sorts of news articles, blog posts, explaining the feature. 0:06:53.608,0:07:00.004 ERIC: Ok, so what we thought we would do here today, is, I went ahead and I went through that process 0:07:00.004,0:07:04.609 before we started this Hangout, and I've connected my personal YouTube channel here 0:07:04.609,0:07:07.936 with Amara, so that feature should be enabled 0:07:07.936,0:07:11.905 and since, crowdsourcing.org, we've got a very global audience 0:07:11.905,0:07:13.270 folks around the world 0:07:13.270,0:07:15.304 we've got a very, multi-lingual audience 0:07:15.304,0:07:18.299 we figured we'd throw it out to, that crowd. 0:07:18.299,0:07:24.171 And ask you to please go ahead -- go ahead and translate! Translate this video 0:07:24.171,0:07:27.215 and help get out the word about Amara, and about this great service 0:07:27.215,0:07:31.268 that a while is crowd-sourcing of global video. 0:07:31.268,0:07:35.050 So, once we're done here, this will be posted to YouTube, 0:07:35.050,0:07:42.905 and it'll be plugged in, and set up, and ready for folks use Amara to go ahead and translate and caption it. 0:07:42.905,0:07:46.536 And, so I wonder if somebody in the future is watching this video 0:07:46.536,0:07:49.737 perhaps in their native language, that is not English 0:07:49.737,0:07:52.966 is there anything else, Nicholas, that you want to say to them? 0:07:52.966,0:07:58.645 In terms of, I don't know, tips for using Amara? Or spread the word otherwise? 0:07:58.645,0:08:01.546 NICHOLAS: Well I -- I really like how "meta" this project is 0:08:01.546,0:08:07.633 I like the idea that -- that at some moment somebody is going to be typing out the words that I'm speaking right now 0:08:07.633,0:08:10.170 and they're going to realize that I'm talking about them :) 0:08:10.170,0:08:14.506 as they type what I'm saying and then people are translating that. 0:08:14.506,0:08:16.670 So I love that! 0:08:16.670,0:08:19.769 And yeah, anybody that's helping out 0:08:19.769,0:08:23.069 anybody that's watching this in another language 0:08:23.069,0:08:25.238 I just would encourage you to come to Amara.org 0:08:25.238,0:08:27.838 check out all the other volunteer projects we have 0:08:27.838,0:08:30.536 with educational organizations, 0:08:30.536,0:08:32.340 non-profits, 0:08:32.340,0:08:33.939 we have two groups on our site 0:08:33.939,0:08:36.300 that are for folks that are deaf and hard-of-heading 0:08:36.300,0:08:41.701 That are -- will request videos that they want to be able to watch that don't have any captions. 0:08:41.701,0:08:44.504 So you can help caption a video for somebody who's deaf 0:08:44.504,0:08:47.702 that wants to watch something that's not available otherwise 0:08:47.702,0:08:49.804 captioning music videos, 0:08:49.804,0:08:52.298 so there's a lot of ways to get involved. 0:08:52.298,0:08:53.904 And of course, if you're a publisher of videos, 0:08:53.904,0:08:55.382 if you have a YouTube channel 0:08:55.382,0:08:57.550 whether you're an individual or an organization 0:08:57.550,0:09:01.401 come to Amara.org and let us help you reach the world 0:09:01.401,0:09:05.383 and make all of your content accessible. 0:09:05.383,0:09:07.286 ERIC: Are you working on anything else at Amara? 0:09:07.286,0:09:11.760 Any new features of services coming up that you could give us a preview of? 0:09:11.760,0:09:13.966 NICHOLAS: Of course. Tons of things! Tons of things. 0:09:13.966,0:09:20.121 Um, I, you know, the biggest project, probably, is that we're working on a brand new editor 0:09:20.182,0:09:23.505 subtitle editor and set of translation tools. 0:09:23.505,0:09:26.633 I think we already have the best tool out there. 0:09:26.633,0:09:30.901 And we've learned a lot since we launched in the past year or two 0:09:30.901,0:09:35.236 about what makes subtitling easy, enjoyable, fast, 0:09:35.236,0:09:40.837 and how do we make it really easy for people to collaborate with each other, to review each other's work 0:09:40.837,0:09:44.705 to get subtitles in a very high-level of quality in a very enjoyable way 0:09:44.705,0:09:47.903 So we're completely rebuilding out subtitle editor 0:09:47.903,0:09:52.132 and I think it's going to be a pretty amazing product when it comes out. 0:09:52.132,0:09:54.404 ERIC: Great, well I really love the work you're doing 0:09:54.404,0:09:56.202 and I think it's really beneficial 0:09:56.202,0:09:57.938 and we look forward to following you 0:09:57.938,0:09:59.836 and of course, the websites, to get more information 0:09:59.836,0:10:04.178 the one that we talked about, Amara.org and crowdsourcing.org 0:10:04.239,0:10:08.204 Nicholas, thanks so much for sitting here and talking with me 0:10:08.204,0:10:12.111 and we'll uh -- and we'll see how this little experiment goes! 0:10:12.111,0:10:14.000 NICHOLAS: Awesome! My pleasure. Thank you!