Transcribing Indian English: A Simple Guide To Using AI To Speed Up Transcription And Add Open Captions

Today we are going to look at how to transcribe Indian English. Firstly of course, what is Indian English, and what does it sound like? How many such dialects exist? Have a look.

Now that we know what Indian English sounds like, we are going to use a short clip from Rajya Sabha TV, an Indian government content creator. We use our AI to transcribe this clip.

Lastly, we add an Auto-Overlay so that we can show you the video. The final output is shown below.

What Is Indian English?

From the folks at Wikipedia, “Indian English is the regional variety of the English language spoken in the Republic of India, and among the Indian diaspora elsewhere in the world. The Constitution of India has mandated Hindi in the Devanagari script to be the official language of the Indian union; English is an additional official language for government work along with Hindi.”

Cool. What does it sound like?

Are you keen on hearing what other dialects of English sound like? Here are some samples.

How Do I Transcribe Indian English?

Follow the below to transcribe your content in Indian English.

1. Click on the English Template and add an new Item. We've called it rstv1 in the image.

   

2. Upload your video. We’ve made some changes to the upload screen which you can see below.

   

3. Use Action -> Transcribe and a modal similar to below should show up. In the below image we have used Indian English - essentially telling the Artificial Intelligence that our video should be transcribed the the Indian English specific AI.

   

4. The item will close and a little spinner will appear. Once complete the item with un-gray and we go in and look at our transcript. The captions button gets highlighted. Woohoo! This is the half way mark - now we have to clean up the transcript a little bit.

How Accurate Is The AI Transcribed Video? How Do I Make Changes If I Need To Edit The Transcript?

We always recommend you have a subject matter expert check the AI's work - this process is called post-editing.

1. Scroll down so you see the captions - the video will pop out as a picture-in-picture for easier editing.

   

2. To start with click on the text colour box and change it so you get a decent contrast - we picked blue. The idea is to change the colour to make it easier to work with - note this is just to make your life easier!

   

3. Now go through and make any changes you need! Remember you can change both the times and text to match your use case. We made a number of changes - mostly fixing time/words and adding grammar. Below, you can see we go from 2 -5. This makes no difference, and will be auto-fixed on save.

   

Add In Open Captions Using the Auto-Overlay Functionality

Now that we have our captions sorted out we add in Open Captions. Open Captions are recommended from both (a) accessibility considerations, and (b) increasing traction on social media.

1. Use the Action -> Auto-Overlay to add font Montserrat yellow text with size 30. This looks like below.

   

2. We are also going to add a blue highlight.

   

3. All done - what do you think? Download the asset and deploy!

Conclusion

Edit: We originally use the yellow test/blue highlight in the last section. This looked terrible on top of the pastel colouring of the video. So it was changed to black text/yellow highlight.

In another blog post we will translate the content into Hindi. And then get an AI to speak out the Hindi content. Stay tuned!

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