Public Media Venture Group’s testbed ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV station in Tennessee is translating closed captioning from English to Spanish in real time using an AI-powered engine.
Televisions equipped with an ATSC 3.0 receiver can be adjusted to display the captions through the set’s accessibility menu, a news release said.
“Captioning has extended the reach of public broadcasters to hearing-impaired viewers but has — until now — only been available in English,” PMVG President Marc Hand said in the release. “This new service will extend the benefits of closed captions to households where English is not the primary language.”
PBS station WCTE is simulcasting its primary signal on PMVG’s NextGen TV transmitter in the Cookeville, Tenn., area with the translated captioning, the release said. WCTE is a member of PMVG, a nonprofit group of 32 public media organizations that develops scalable technology use cases with the goal of sustaining public media.
Other collaborators in the project are California-based AI translation company XL8; DigiCAP, a South Korean company that provides software-based devices to support the ATSC 3.0 broadcast system; and RAPA, also known as the Korean Radio Promotion Association.
“We have a significant number of households in the WCTE coverage area where Spanish is the first language,” WCTE CEO Avery Hutchins said in the release. “We are thrilled to work with PMVG, DigiCAP, and XL8 to make public television content more accessible to these important members of our community.”
WCTE is working with local media and service organizations to let potential viewers know about the service, PMVG Senior Consultant Vincent Curren said in an email.
The translation system had been operating in “quiet mode” for a few months before PMVG’s Dec. 4 announcement, Curren added. PMVG plans to test the technology for a year before evaluating how well it works and the appeal of the service.
PMVG announced the launch of the NextGen TV service in Cookeville in July. WCTE hosts the station’s transmitter and antenna on its Monterey, Tenn., tower.
“Our ATSC 3.0 station in Cookeville reaches about 300,000 people,” Curren said. “We don’t know how many NextGen sets are in the coverage area to benefit from the service yet, but we expect the number to grow over the next year. The availability of this service could be a good incentive for Spanish speaking households in the area to purchase a NextGen TV set or set top receiver, and we will try to monitor that as well.”
The real-time captions use a translation engine from XL8. The engine uses AI and machine learning for translations that can factor in local language variations, XL8 CEO Tim Jung said in the release.
“This is ideal for broadcasters who operate in unique local environments,” Jung said.