Introduction
The use of AI in audiovisual content is already a reality. Platforms like Watchity are currently capable of offering an end-to-end service for cloud-based production, management, and distribution of audiovisual content. The advantage of having a comprehensive cloud service is its ability to easily control complete content management and distribution for companies or institutions in a scalable manner. This enables both small and large businesses to easily access an all-in-one video platform without requiring substantial investments.
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have significantly impacted the creation and management of content. The integration of new AI technologies into a comprehensive cloud platform opens doors to productivity enhancements for platform users and new services that can be offered to their audience. This article will explore some of the advancements AI brings in this context.
AI Technologies Applied to Audiovisual Content
Let’s delve into several AI technologies crucial for content production and management, categorized into three major blocks: those applied to visual content, those related to audio content, and other general enhancements resulting from a combination of both.
Application of AI on Visual Content
Applying AI techniques to visual content enables the detection and identification of visual elements, such as:
- Facial recognition: identifying faces in video streams to enhance framing by focusing on the face.
- Object, scene, and activity detection: labeling videos for future management or identifying elements to link to other content (links, banners, videos, etc.).
- Celebrity or individual recognition: facilitating automatic tagging, on-screen titling, or inserting related content.
- Visual text recognition (OCR): extracting and recognizing text appearing in videos, such as signs, billboards, titles, etc.
- Detailed video analysis: detecting black frames, changes in shots, credits, key frames, extracting best thumbnails, etc.
Application of AI on Audio Content
Utilizing AI techniques on audio content resolves a wide range of needs through text processing obtained via Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), including:
- Voice-to-text conversion: automatically transcribing spoken words in a video in various languages.
- Translation: translating transcriptions into multiple languages for enhanced content accessibility.
- Speaker recognition: identifying and tagging different speakers, obtaining metrics on who spoke and for how long.
- Keyword extraction: extracting and indexing keywords from spoken or visual content to improve search and navigation capabilities.
- Audio effects recognition: identifying and tagging audio sounds in content, such as applause, words, silence, etc.
Application of AI on Audiovisual Content
At a higher level, combining audio and video, AI enables the extraction of high-level features:
- Sentiment analysis: analyzing sentiment throughout a video as positive, negative, or neutral.
- Emotion detection: detecting and labeling human emotions like sadness, anger, joy, etc., in content.
- Brand recognition: identifying visually appearing or mentioned brands in a video.
- Theme identification: tagging different themes occurring in content, such as art, science, sports, etc.
AI applications in Watchity
Among the potential AI applications mentioned earlier, Watchity is primarily focused on incorporating AI advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) into audiovisual production and management. Currently, obtaining a complete transcription of events like webinars or product presentations is relatively straightforward. This transcription includes time stamps associated with the video, allowing for:
- A complete transcription of event discussions.
- On-demand video availability with subtitles. As complexity increases through additional elements derived from the transcription and subtitles, several enhancements are envisaged:
- Diarization: segmenting recognized text based on speakers, aiding hearing-impaired individuals with structured transcription.
- Translation: translating text to multiple languages, especially useful for multi-language subtitles in international content dissemination.
- Real-time capabilities: implementing the mentioned features in real-time using cloud servers with GPU processing capacity, despite impacting parameters like Word Error Rate and latency.
- “Summarization”: AI techniques allow summarizing spoken content into text format, structuring it by speaker or specific aspects discussed. Utilizing transcription technology and its enhancements, Watchity plans to introduce support services for audiovisual production and management:
- Intelligent search: synchronized transcribed content facilitates agile content management by identifying video segments containing specific words and their exact occurrence.
- Automatic tagging: automated transcription and keyword extraction ease content classification in the database.
- Editing support: leveraging diarized and synchronized transcription for manual video editing by easily selecting phrases corresponding to specific moments.
- Automatic video summarization: extracting relevant phrases from transcriptions and automatically selecting associated clips to generate a relevant content edit.
- Automated production: real-time keyword detection enabling automated production events like launching covers, videos, polls, results, etc., by presenter voice activation.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence has made significant inroads into our society. In a cloud-based content production, management, and distribution platform like Watchity, AI represents an opportunity to enhance client productivity in content management, automate production, and distribute enriched content to the audience. Examples of these enhancements include intelligent search, real-time multi-language automatic subtitles, and automatic video summarization.