Eros Now to leverage Google Cloud for AI-driven subtitling feature

Eros Now says it is the first streaming service globally to automate subtitling feature with the help of Google Cloud technologies.

The new subtitling feature will be first available in the Arabic language (Eros Now/Screenshot)

Eros Now on Tuesday said it had collaborated with Google Cloud to use the latter's Artificial Intelligence technology for streaming its entire range of movies and originals with automated subtitles.

The AI-powered subtitle feature will be first available in the Arabic language. The company says the language support will cater to the “massive Arab audiences” who love Indian cinema and other markets that consume Indian entertainment content.

Eros Now also elaborated on how it was using the cutting-edge technology on its streaming platform.

“With the use of AI frameworks and the vast amount of pre-existing data, Eros Now's in-house Data Science team simulated, trained and developed a cutting-edge model which performs equivalent to a human level and is capable of generating subtitles in desired languages across movies and originals,” the company said in a release.

According to the company, the deployment will help drive higher consumer engagement levels and open a new window of opportunities in “text-to-speech” automation. The company pointed out that the model could be deployed for different genres and languages.

“Dealing with gender non-neutral languages and a variety of punctuations used in different languages were just a few of the biggest challenges. The automation process has taken over six months for data scientists to perfect,” the company added.

Eros Now is owned by Eros STX Global Corporation. The OTT platform has rights to more than 12,000 films across Hindi and regional languages. As of September 2020, the platform had over 211 million registered users and 36.2 million paying subscribers.

Eros in the past has experimented with other new-age technologies as well. Last year, it teamed up with American video game and software firm Epic Games to bring “Unreal Engine” technology to Indian movies. Epic Games, known for games like Fortnite, said it would provide technologies such as real-time rendering, better VFX and virtual production.

In 2019, Eros Now had teamed up with Microsoft to leverage the Azure cloud platform to host and stream its digital video offerings.