1 00:00:05,171 --> 00:00:08,751 ERIC: So we're here in Google Plus Hangout on the air. 2 00:00:08,751 --> 00:00:11,835 I'm Eric Mack, managing editor of Crowdsourcing.org, 3 00:00:11,835 --> 00:00:16,667 and also, in the hangout, we've got Nicholas Reville, 4 00:00:16,667 --> 00:00:20,168 who is co-founder and executive director of Amara 5 00:00:20,168 --> 00:00:24,919 and before we talk about what we're doing here today, maybe to get us started, 6 00:00:24,919 --> 00:00:28,537 Nicholas, explain a little bit about what Amara is and what you guys do. 7 00:00:28,537 --> 00:00:31,167 NICHOLAS: Sure. Nice to be here. 8 00:00:31,167 --> 00:00:37,501 Uh... So, Amara.org is a subtitling, captioning - subtitling and captioning platform, 9 00:00:37,501 --> 00:00:41,537 and what really makes it unique, I think, is that we're really knocking down 10 00:00:41,537 --> 00:00:44,504 a bunch of the barriers that make captions and subtitles 11 00:00:44,504 --> 00:00:48,038 so difficult to create and so rare for online video. 12 00:00:48,038 --> 00:00:53,501 And, so, we have what I think is the easiest to use and I hope most enjoyable 13 00:00:53,501 --> 00:00:56,213 subtitling interface anywhere. 14 00:00:56,213 --> 00:00:57,971 We're also compatible with lots of sites. 15 00:00:57,971 --> 00:01:01,369 You can bring your YouTube video, Vimeo video, HTML file, 16 00:01:01,369 --> 00:01:04,001 DailyMotion video, to our site, 17 00:01:04,001 --> 00:01:05,309 add captions and subtitles. 18 00:01:05,309 --> 00:01:11,069 But, most importantly, we're making it possible for a lot of people 19 00:01:11,069 --> 00:01:14,438 to collaboratively work on creating captions and subtitles, 20 00:01:14,438 --> 00:01:23,373 and we think that the only way that you can get captioning and subtitling done on thousands and millions of web videos 21 00:01:23,373 --> 00:01:28,906 is if you ask the viewers to participate, and we think it is really a Wikipedia-type problem - 22 00:01:28,906 --> 00:01:34,307 something that's so huge in scale and requires so much distributed expertise 23 00:01:34,307 --> 00:01:38,871 that we need to bring people from around the world 24 00:01:38,871 --> 00:01:41,168 in to help make video accessible. 25 00:01:41,168 --> 00:01:48,168 And we got started because we were looking at online video, looking at web video, 26 00:01:48,168 --> 00:01:53,607 and realising how important captions and subtitles were for people that have access, 27 00:01:53,607 --> 00:01:59,804 and yet, how rare they were. And, so, right now, we work with a bunch of education companies 28 00:01:59,804 --> 00:02:04,336 and I can talk more about that - but they're creating videos of educational courses 29 00:02:04,336 --> 00:02:06,938 and sending those around the world for peple to watch. 30 00:02:06,938 --> 00:02:10,104 But, if you don't speak English, you need a way to have... 31 00:02:10,104 --> 00:02:13,469 You need a way to watch, you need a way to understand that. 32 00:02:13,469 --> 00:02:18,136 Um, and Amara makes that possible by inviting viewers, by inviting students, 33 00:02:18,136 --> 00:02:24,475 to help translate the videos into dozens and over a hundred languages. 34 00:02:24,475 --> 00:02:30,335 ERIC: So, yeah, I mean it's global crowd-sourcing of kind of the, you know, real-time news culture 35 00:02:30,335 --> 00:02:33,874 that is becoming more and more prevalent, worldwide. 36 00:02:33,874 --> 00:02:40,438 And, it strikes me as something that is particularly useful in this age of, of things like the Arab Spring 37 00:02:40,438 --> 00:02:47,271 where there's things going on in other parts of the world that affect Americans, affect people all over the world 38 00:02:47,271 --> 00:02:50,871 but we're not necessarily sharing language with those places 39 00:02:50,871 --> 00:02:54,278 And I wonder if maybe you could give a couple -- other examples 40 00:02:54,278 --> 00:02:59,605 of, uh, places where Amara has already been put to good use 41 00:02:59,605 --> 00:03:03,168 I know you've done some -- the State of the Union Address, I think 42 00:03:03,168 --> 00:03:05,971 was one place, uh, where Amara's been really useful 43 00:03:05,971 --> 00:03:09,900 can you give us any other, uh, use cases, any other success stories? 44 00:03:09,976 --> 00:03:12,759 NICHOLAS: Sure. So, the Arab Spring is a great example, 45 00:03:12,789 --> 00:03:15,302 in that we saw a whole bunch of usage then, 46 00:03:15,302 --> 00:03:17,603 videos going into and out of Arabic 47 00:03:17,603 --> 00:03:20,337 and a whole bunch of countries during that time. 48 00:03:20,337 --> 00:03:26,132 During the Japanese earthquake, we had a really, really interesting video. 49 00:03:26,132 --> 00:03:28,883 There were a whole bunch of videos going in and out of Japanese 50 00:03:28,883 --> 00:03:33,466 but, we noticed that there was one video 51 00:03:33,466 --> 00:03:37,635 on our site that was getting watched hundreds of thousands of times 52 00:03:37,635 --> 00:03:40,104 it was being shared on Twitter dozens of times a minute. 53 00:03:40,104 --> 00:03:46,504 And it had been translated, just from English into Japanese by one person. 54 00:03:46,504 --> 00:03:49,903 There weren't even -- it wasn't even transcribed in English at first 55 00:03:49,903 --> 00:03:55,267 and it turned out to be a documentary on that was on YouTube 56 00:03:55,267 --> 00:03:58,049 that had been produced 20 or 25 years ago 57 00:03:58,049 --> 00:04:04,604 about Chernobyl, and about the aftermath of Chernobyl in Russia, 58 00:04:04,604 --> 00:04:11,201 and it was of sudden, of urgent, as you can imagine, relevance to people in Japan, after the earthquake 59 00:04:11,201 --> 00:04:13,800 in dealing with their own nuclear crisis. 60 00:04:13,800 --> 00:04:16,550 So, that was a great example of a community 61 00:04:16,550 --> 00:04:20,335 that really, urgently needed a piece of information 62 00:04:20,335 --> 00:04:23,070 it wasn't even - it wasn't even new news 63 00:04:23,070 --> 00:04:26,737 But it was something that was urgently relevant 64 00:04:26,737 --> 00:04:31,843 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. 65 00:04:31,843 --> 00:04:34,835 And, in a more real time sense, 66 00:04:34,835 --> 00:04:38,768 we've seen things like the Kony 2012 video 67 00:04:38,768 --> 00:04:41,632 which was a very controversial, but also extremely popular 68 00:04:41,632 --> 00:04:46,570 activism video at the beginning of 2012 69 00:04:46,570 --> 00:04:51,268 that was translated on our site into more than 20 languages 70 00:04:51,268 --> 00:04:52,737 in just two days 71 00:04:52,737 --> 00:04:56,537 because it was being shared so quickly and so widely 72 00:04:56,537 --> 00:04:58,887 and people wanted to watch it everywhere. 73 00:04:58,887 --> 00:05:03,506 ERIC: So the reason that, um, I wanted to speak with you today, 74 00:05:03,506 --> 00:05:06,673 is, just recently you've launched this app, I suppose 75 00:05:06,673 --> 00:05:09,874 that plugs into YouTube 76 00:05:09,874 --> 00:05:15,938 and allows for anyone, uh, to, you know, join the team 77 00:05:15,938 --> 00:05:17,052 so to speak 78 00:05:17,052 --> 00:05:20,838 and translate and captain any video on YouTube. 79 00:05:20,838 --> 00:05:22,767 Is that right? Am I describing it right? Is that how it works? 80 00:05:22,767 --> 00:05:25,300 NICHOLAS: Yeah that's pretty close to right. 81 00:05:25,300 --> 00:05:27,132 So, this month we launched 82 00:05:27,132 --> 00:05:29,504 major, new capability 83 00:05:29,504 --> 00:05:30,965 and essentially, 84 00:05:30,965 --> 00:05:33,012 if you have a YouTube channel 85 00:05:33,012 --> 00:05:35,410 if you have a personal YouTube channel, 86 00:05:35,410 --> 00:05:38,215 you can connect your YouTube account 87 00:05:38,215 --> 00:05:39,737 to Amara.org. 88 00:05:39,737 --> 00:05:43,003 Takes about, 5 seconds to enable that, 89 00:05:43,003 --> 00:05:49,268 and then, we will add a link on your videos for people to contribute captions and subtitles 90 00:05:49,268 --> 00:05:54,738 and when those are finished, they will get synced back, um, right into your YouTube channel. 91 00:05:54,738 --> 00:05:56,237 So if you have a video that's getting popular 92 00:05:56,237 --> 00:05:57,965 and you invite your viewers to translate it, 93 00:05:57,965 --> 00:06:01,633 you can have subtitles on that video in, you know, 94 00:06:01,633 --> 00:06:03,770 a dozen language very, very quickly. 95 00:06:03,770 --> 00:06:05,217 And that's part of our vision here 96 00:06:05,217 --> 00:06:08,571 is that anything that gets popular -- any video that gets popular 97 00:06:08,571 --> 00:06:10,800 we want it to be accessible around the world 98 00:06:10,800 --> 00:06:12,967 we want people to be able to watch it everywhere 99 00:06:12,967 --> 00:06:14,771 wherever they are. 100 00:06:14,771 --> 00:06:19,271 So if you have a YouTube channel, it's a really easy way to enable that to happen. 101 00:06:19,271 --> 00:06:21,299 And that's something that we've been doing for a few months 102 00:06:21,299 --> 00:06:24,667 even before this launch, with companies and organizations. 103 00:06:24,667 --> 00:06:30,943 So, Twitter, for example, used Amara, in -- at the beginning of the winter 104 00:06:30,943 --> 00:06:33,383 to launch their photo filters feature 105 00:06:33,383 --> 00:06:35,071 their new mobile photo filters feature 106 00:06:35,071 --> 00:06:38,338 they created a launch video for that. 107 00:06:38,338 --> 00:06:43,383 And they translated it into 20 languages before they released it 108 00:06:43,383 --> 00:06:46,167 and then, um, when they made the annoucement 109 00:06:46,167 --> 00:06:53,608 that video was used in all sorts of news articles, blog posts, explaining the feature. 110 00:06:53,608 --> 00:07:00,004 ERIC: Ok, so what we thought we would do here today, is, I went ahead and I went through that process 111 00:07:00,004 --> 00:07:04,609 before we started this Hangout, and I've connected my personal YouTube channel here 112 00:07:04,609 --> 00:07:07,936 with Amara, so that feature should be enabled 113 00:07:07,936 --> 00:07:11,905 and since, crowdsourcing.org, we've got a very global audience 114 00:07:11,905 --> 00:07:13,270 folks around the world 115 00:07:13,270 --> 00:07:15,304 we've got a very, multi-lingual audience 116 00:07:15,304 --> 00:07:18,299 we figured we'd throw it out to, that crowd. 117 00:07:18,299 --> 00:07:24,171 And ask you to please go ahead -- go ahead and translate! Translate this video 118 00:07:24,171 --> 00:07:27,215 and help get out the word about Amara, and about this great service 119 00:07:27,215 --> 00:07:31,268 that a while is crowd-sourcing of global video. 120 00:07:31,268 --> 00:07:35,050 So, once we're done here, this will be posted to YouTube, 121 00:07:35,050 --> 00:07:42,905 and it'll be plugged in, and set up, and ready for folks use Amara to go ahead and translate and caption it. 122 00:07:42,905 --> 00:07:46,536 And, so I wonder if somebody in the future is watching this video 123 00:07:46,536 --> 00:07:49,737 perhaps in their native language, that is not English 124 00:07:49,737 --> 00:07:52,966 is there anything else, Nicholas, that you want to say to them? 125 00:07:52,966 --> 00:07:58,645 In terms of, I don't know, tips for using Amara? Or spread the word otherwise? 126 00:07:58,645 --> 00:08:01,546 NICHOLAS: Well I -- I really like how "meta" this project is 127 00:08:01,546 --> 00:08:07,633 I like the idea that -- that at some moment somebody is going to be typing out the words that I'm speaking right now 128 00:08:07,633 --> 00:08:10,170 and they're going to realize that I'm talking about them :) 129 00:08:10,170 --> 00:08:14,506 as they type what I'm saying and then people are translating that. 130 00:08:14,506 --> 00:08:16,670 So I love that! 131 00:08:16,670 --> 00:08:19,769 And yeah, anybody that's helping out 132 00:08:19,769 --> 00:08:23,069 anybody that's watching this in another language 133 00:08:23,069 --> 00:08:25,238 I just would encourage you to come to Amara.org 134 00:08:25,238 --> 00:08:27,838 check out all the other volunteer projects we have 135 00:08:27,838 --> 00:08:30,536 with educational organizations, 136 00:08:30,536 --> 00:08:32,340 non-profits, 137 00:08:32,340 --> 00:08:33,939 we have two groups on our site 138 00:08:33,939 --> 00:08:36,300 that are for folks that are deaf and hard-of-heading 139 00:08:36,300 --> 00:08:41,701 That are -- will request videos that they want to be able to watch that don't have any captions. 140 00:08:41,701 --> 00:08:44,504 So you can help caption a video for somebody who's deaf 141 00:08:44,504 --> 00:08:47,702 that wants to watch something that's not available otherwise 142 00:08:47,702 --> 00:08:49,804 captioning music videos, 143 00:08:49,804 --> 00:08:52,298 so there's a lot of ways to get involved. 144 00:08:52,298 --> 00:08:53,904 And of course, if you're a publisher of videos, 145 00:08:53,904 --> 00:08:55,382 if you have a YouTube channel 146 00:08:55,382 --> 00:08:57,550 whether you're an individual or an organization 147 00:08:57,550 --> 00:09:01,401 come to Amara.org and let us help you reach the world 148 00:09:01,401 --> 00:09:05,383 and make all of your content accessible. 149 00:09:05,383 --> 00:09:07,286 ERIC: Are you working on anything else at Amara? 150 00:09:07,286 --> 00:09:11,760 Any new features of services coming up that you could give us a preview of? 151 00:09:11,760 --> 00:09:13,966 NICHOLAS: Of course. Tons of things! Tons of things. 152 00:09:13,966 --> 00:09:20,121 Um, I, you know, the biggest project, probably, is that we're working on a brand new editor 153 00:09:20,182 --> 00:09:23,505 subtitle editor and set of translation tools. 154 00:09:23,505 --> 00:09:26,633 I think we already have the best tool out there. 155 00:09:26,633 --> 00:09:30,901 And we've learned a lot since we launched in the past year or two 156 00:09:30,901 --> 00:09:35,236 about what makes subtitling easy, enjoyable, fast, 157 00:09:35,236 --> 00:09:40,837 and how do we make it really easy for people to collaborate with each other, to review each other's work 158 00:09:40,837 --> 00:09:44,705 to get subtitles in a very high-level of quality in a very enjoyable way 159 00:09:44,705 --> 00:09:47,903 So we're completely rebuilding out subtitle editor 160 00:09:47,903 --> 00:09:52,132 and I think it's going to be a pretty amazing product when it comes out. 161 00:09:52,132 --> 00:09:54,404 ERIC: Great, well I really love the work you're doing 162 00:09:54,404 --> 00:09:56,202 and I think it's really beneficial 163 00:09:56,202 --> 00:09:57,938 and we look forward to following you 164 00:09:57,938 --> 00:09:59,836 and of course, the websites, to get more information 165 00:09:59,836 --> 00:10:04,178 the one that we talked about, Amara.org and crowdsourcing.org 166 00:10:04,239 --> 00:10:08,204 Nicholas, thanks so much for sitting here and talking with me 167 00:10:08,204 --> 00:10:12,111 and we'll uh -- and we'll see how this little experiment goes! 168 00:10:12,111 --> 00:10:14,000 NICHOLAS: Awesome! My pleasure. Thank you!