creating a video translator is very personal to me (I want my non-english-speaking parents to finally tap into this sea of knowledge I was blessed to have access to). according to gpt, the internet knowledge:
- general: english ~60%, chinese ~15%, spanish ~8%, rest ~17%
- videos: english ~55%, spanish ~15%, hindi ~10%, rest ~20%
can you imagine non-english speakers miss 55% of the world information? imagine the potential such a tool can unlock. I don't even want a generic "video translator" app, but a knowledge homogenizing app, I tried many tools, but they're either too generic or complex. I want mine to be purpose-driven: I don't want to translate videos, I want to help knowledge transcend language.
I think this is a highly relatable scenario: you've just seen an amazing podcast, documentary, course (think Sapolsky's Human Behavioral Biology) or really any educative content (think Veritasium, Ordinary Things etc.), and you'd love if, via some miracle, your parents (or someone who, for whatever reason, couldn't learn english but who's curious and explorative) would suddenly understand english so you can share it with them. but my approach is attacking the problem from a different angle, and I get what I want: information transfer
it's not perfect, but I'd be extremely happy if such a tool existed. I'm determined to build it if it doesn't exist. I asked gpt/grok and googled "video translator" and all I've got was either generic multi-purpose ai video services, or when I've found a platform that does all that in one go, the results were subpar. the best was 11labs' video translator (edit: actually heygen is better than 11labs rn, and it's acceptable), though still subpar, and they're more like a studio while I'd like a more social/friendly/instant spin, an app that only does one thing and it does it well. I don't care if it'll just be a wrapper around 11labs or whatever tool that'll pop up in the meantime, I'm just imagining the UX that has to be stellarly neat.
I know Lex Fridman had some of his vids translated to spanish (with 11labs I think) and it looked pretty good, I think he mentioned they've manually edited it too. I'm not looking to automate it to this level of perfection, but just to transfer at least 80-90% of the information to non-english speakers while removing any distracting audio artifacts etc., I'd even like to have a simple mobile app to which you share a video link (direct link or youtube, agreeing you own the rights), and then the app notifies the backend to start processing, and opens another native sharing dialog (where it asks what app to share the link to, i.e. whatsapp, email, telegram etc.) with a new link where they can watch the translated video, once it processes
- general: english ~60%, chinese ~15%, spanish ~8%, rest ~17%
- videos: english ~55%, spanish ~15%, hindi ~10%, rest ~20%
can you imagine non-english speakers miss 55% of the world information? imagine the potential such a tool can unlock. I don't even want a generic "video translator" app, but a knowledge homogenizing app, I tried many tools, but they're either too generic or complex. I want mine to be purpose-driven: I don't want to translate videos, I want to help knowledge transcend language.
I think this is a highly relatable scenario: you've just seen an amazing podcast, documentary, course (think Sapolsky's Human Behavioral Biology) or really any educative content (think Veritasium, Ordinary Things etc.), and you'd love if, via some miracle, your parents (or someone who, for whatever reason, couldn't learn english but who's curious and explorative) would suddenly understand english so you can share it with them. but my approach is attacking the problem from a different angle, and I get what I want: information transfer
it's not perfect, but I'd be extremely happy if such a tool existed. I'm determined to build it if it doesn't exist. I asked gpt/grok and googled "video translator" and all I've got was either generic multi-purpose ai video services, or when I've found a platform that does all that in one go, the results were subpar. the best was 11labs' video translator (edit: actually heygen is better than 11labs rn, and it's acceptable), though still subpar, and they're more like a studio while I'd like a more social/friendly/instant spin, an app that only does one thing and it does it well. I don't care if it'll just be a wrapper around 11labs or whatever tool that'll pop up in the meantime, I'm just imagining the UX that has to be stellarly neat.
I know Lex Fridman had some of his vids translated to spanish (with 11labs I think) and it looked pretty good, I think he mentioned they've manually edited it too. I'm not looking to automate it to this level of perfection, but just to transfer at least 80-90% of the information to non-english speakers while removing any distracting audio artifacts etc., I'd even like to have a simple mobile app to which you share a video link (direct link or youtube, agreeing you own the rights), and then the app notifies the backend to start processing, and opens another native sharing dialog (where it asks what app to share the link to, i.e. whatsapp, email, telegram etc.) with a new link where they can watch the translated video, once it processes