Variety: Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max Using Google Gen AI Platform to Create Closed Captions

Story from Variety:

Warner Bros. Discovery has launched a new AI-powered solution to automatically generate closed captions for content on its Max streaming service — saving considerable time and money, according to the media company.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s “Caption AI” project for Max uses Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. Initially, the company is using the technology for unscripted programming in the U.S. on the streamer. Warner Bros. Discovery said that “to maintain high levels of accuracy,” the workflow process uses Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to “optimize” captioning and the results are reviewed by humans for “quality assurance.”

According to Warner Bros. Discovery, the “Caption AI” workflow reduces caption file creation time up to 80% compared with manual captioning and cuts captioning costs by up to 50%.

“Providing viewers with high-quality captions is incredibly important to Warner Bros. Discovery,” Avi Saxena, CTO of Warner Bros. Discovery’s Direct to Consumer streaming division, said in a statement. “Working with Google Cloud to utilize Vertex AI within Warner Bros. Discovery’s caption AI workflow has not only helped to accelerate our captioning process, but also has improved our efficiency and speed, while reducing costs.”

Some in Hollywood have viewed generative AI as an “existential threat,” and provisions to put guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence for TV and film productions were a key part of the deals resolving last year’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes and subsequent agreements.

That said, media and entertainment companies are increasingly looking at AI to cut costs and add a new tool to their creative arsenal. For example, last week Lionsgate announced a deal with applied AI research company Runway to let filmmakers and other creative talent “augment their work” using Runway’s tool to generate “cinematic video.”

Beyond auto-generating closed captioning, “AI has the potential to transform a variety of processes across the media and entertainment industry that deliver real business impact,” according to Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

Last week, Google released a report, “The ROI of Gen AI in Media and Entertainment,” based on a global survey of 263 senior industry execs. According to the survey, 64% of media and entertainment executives have already moved gen-AI applications into production.

In addition, 63% of those running gen AI in production said they saw an increase in revenue from the deployment, and 83% said they were able to implement a gen-AI use case idea into production within six months, per the Google survey.