Caption this Hangout with Amara!

ERIC: So we're here in Google Plus Hangout on the air.

I'm Eric Mack, managing editor of Crowdsourcing.org,

and also, in the hangout, we've got Nicholas Reville,

who is co-founder and executive director of Amara

and before we talk about what we're doing here today, maybe to get us started,

Nicholas, explain a little bit about what Amara is and what you guys do.

NICHOLAS: Sure. Nice to be here.

Uh... So, Amara.org is a subtitling, captioning - subtitling and captioning platform,

and what really makes it unique, I think, is that we're really knocking down

a bunch of the barriers that make captions and subtitles

so difficult to create and so rare for online video.

And, so, we have what I think is the easiest to use and I hope most enjoyable

subtitling interface anywhere.

We're also compatible with lots of sites.

You can bring your YouTube video, Vimeo video, HTML file,

DailyMotion video, to our site,

add captions and subtitles.

But, most importantly, we're making it possible for a lot of people

to collaboratively work on creating captions and subtitles,

and we think that the only way that you can get captioning and subtitling done on thousands and millions of web videos

is if you ask the viewers to participate, and we think it is really a Wikipedia-type problem -

something that's so huge in scale and requires so much distributed expertise

that we need to bring people from around the world

in to help make video accessible.

And we got started because we were looking at online video, looking at web video,

and realising how important captions and subtitles were for people that have access,

and yet, how rare they were. And, so, right now, we work with a bunch of education companies

and I can talk more about that - but they're creating videos of educational courses

and sending those around the world for peple to watch.

But, if you don't speak English, you need a way to have...

You need a way to watch, you need a way to understand that.

Um, and Amara makes that possible by inviting viewers, by inviting students,

to help translate the videos into dozens and over a hundred languages.

ERIC: So, yeah, I mean it's global crowd-sourcing of kind of the, you know, real-time news culture

that is becoming more and more prevalent, worldwide.

And, it strikes me as something that is particularly useful in this age of, of things like the Arab Spring

where there's things going on in other parts of the world that affect Americans, affect people all over the world

but we're not necessarily sharing language with those places

And I wonder if maybe you could give a couple -- other examples

of, uh, places where Amara has already been put to good use

I know you've done some -- the State of the Union Address, I think

was one place, uh, where Amara's been really useful

can you give us any other, uh, use cases, any other success stories?

NICHOLAS: Sure. So, the Arab Spring is a great example,

in that we saw a whole bunch of usage then,

videos going into and out of Arabic

and a whole bunch of countries during that time.

During the Japanese earthquake, we had a really, really interesting video.

There were a whole bunch of videos going in and out of Japanese

but, we noticed that there was one video

on our site that was getting watched hundreds of thousands of times

it was being shared on Twitter dozens of times a minute.

And it had been translated, just from English into Japanese by one person.

There weren't even -- it wasn't even transcribed in English at first

and it turned out to be a documentary on that was on YouTube

that had been produced 20 or 25 years ago

about Chernobyl, and about the aftermath of Chernobyl in Russia,

and it was of sudden, of urgent, as you can imagine, relevance to people in Japan, after the earthquake

in dealing with their own nuclear crisis.

So, that was a great example of a community

that really, urgently needed a piece of information

it wasn't even - it wasn't even new news

But it was something that was urgently relevant

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.

And, in a more real time sense,

we've seen things like the Kony 2012 video

which was a very controversial, but also extremely popular

activism video at the beginning of 2012

that was translated on our site into more than 20 languages

in just two days

because it was being shared so quickly and so widely

and people wanted to watch it everywhere.

ERIC: So the reason that, um, I wanted to speak with you today,

is, just recently you've launched this app, I suppose

that plugs into YouTube

and allows for anyone, uh, to, you know, join the team

so to speak

and translate and captain any video on YouTube.

Is that right? Am I describing it right? Is that how it works?

NICHOLAS: Yeah that's pretty close to right.

So, this month we launched

major, new capability

and essentially,

if you have a YouTube channel

if you have a personal YouTube channel,

you can connect your YouTube account

to Amara.org.

Takes about, 5 seconds to enable that,

and then, we will add a link on your videos for people to contribute captions and subtitles

and when those are finished, they will get synced back, um, right into your YouTube channel.

So if you have a video that's getting popular

and you invite your viewers to translate it,

you can have subtitles on that video in, you know,

a dozen language very, very quickly.

And that's part of our vision here

is that anything that gets popular -- any video that gets popular

we want it to be accessible around the world

we want people to be able to watch it everywhere

wherever they are.

So if you have a YouTube channel, it's a really easy way to enable that to happen.

And that's something that we've been doing for a few months

even before this launch, with companies and organizations.

So, Twitter, for example, used Amara, in -- at the beginning of the winter

to launch their photo filters feature

their new mobile photo filters feature

they created a launch video for that.

And they translated it into 20 languages before they released it

and then, um, when they made the annoucement

that video was used in all sorts of news articles, blog posts, explaining the feature.

ERIC: Ok, so what we thought we would do here today, is, I went ahead and I went through that process

before we started this Hangout, and I've connected my personal YouTube channel here

with Amara, so that feature should be enabled

and since, crowdsourcing.org, we've got a very global audience

folks around the world

we've got a very, multi-lingual audience

we figured we'd throw it out to, that crowd.

And ask you to please go ahead -- go ahead and translate! Translate this video

and help get out the word about Amara, and about this great service

that a while is crowd-sourcing of global video.

So, once we're done here, this will be posted to YouTube,

and it'll be plugged in, and set up, and ready for folks use Amara to go ahead and translate and caption it.

And, so I wonder if somebody in the future is watching this video

perhaps in their native language, that is not English

is there anything else, Nicholas, that you want to say to them?

In terms of, I don't know, tips for using Amara? Or spread the word otherwise?

NICHOLAS: Well I -- I really like how "meta" this project is

I like the idea that -- that at some moment somebody is going to be typing out the words that I'm speaking right now

and they're going to realize that I'm talking about them :)

as they type what I'm saying and then people are translating that.

So I love that!

And yeah, anybody that's helping out

anybody that's watching this in another language

I just would encourage you to come to Amara.org

check out all the other volunteer projects we have

with educational organizations,

non-profits,

we have two groups on our site

that are for folks that are deaf and hard-of-heading

That are -- will request videos that they want to be able to watch that don't have any captions.

So you can help caption a video for somebody who's deaf

that wants to watch something that's not available otherwise

captioning music videos,

so there's a lot of ways to get involved.

And of course, if you're a publisher of videos,

if you have a YouTube channel

whether you're an individual or an organization

come to Amara.org and let us help you reach the world

and make all of your content accessible.

ERIC: Are you working on anything else at Amara?

Any new features of services coming up that you could give us a preview of?

NICHOLAS: Of course. Tons of things! Tons of things.

Um, I, you know, the biggest project, probably, is that we're working on a brand new editor

subtitle editor and set of translation tools.

I think we already have the best tool out there.

And we've learned a lot since we launched in the past year or two

about what makes subtitling easy, enjoyable, fast,

and how do we make it really easy for people to collaborate with each other, to review each other's work

to get subtitles in a very high-level of quality in a very enjoyable way

So we're completely rebuilding out subtitle editor

and I think it's going to be a pretty amazing product when it comes out.

ERIC: Great, well I really love the work you're doing

and I think it's really beneficial

and we look forward to following you

and of course, the websites, to get more information

the one that we talked about, Amara.org and crowdsourcing.org

Nicholas, thanks so much for sitting here and talking with me

and we'll uh -- and we'll see how this little experiment goes!

NICHOLAS: Awesome! My pleasure. Thank you!