They better have had traffic cones on their heads. The mental image that creates is quite funny with the contrast to the serious businesmen trying to sell AI one booth over.
Robert’s interview with the AI home assistant robot guy this year was unintentionally amazing, the dude was dressed like Jordan Peterson (ie. an insane person) but had all the interviewing skills of a parboiled potato. And he had no clue that Robert was clowning on him so hard.
I mostly know of him from Behind the Bastards, a podcast about prominent historical figures (usually 1800s through present). The twist, apart from their regular Christmas “Non-Bastard” episodes is of course that these influential people actually behaved questionably at best during their time. I really think Robert’s research and storytelling are great, he and the guests he brings on really can make an hour fly by sometimes. Most of the biographies are split up into a couple parts, with people like Kissinger and Vince McMahon having such dubious pasts to earn them 6 parts each.
Anyway, the interview with the AI home assistant dude was from another podcast which he frequents, called It Could Happen Here, a more news-oriented podcast. Both of the podcasts can be found on YouTube, published by Cool Zone Media. I believe they did 3 episodes of CES coverage for this year, the final part contained the interview. After all the dunking Robert talks about another interview he had at CES which was a lot more uplifting.
The popular open-source VLC video player was demonstrated on the floor of CES 2025 with automatic AI subtitling and translation, generated locally and offline in real time. Parent organization VideoLAN shared a video on Tuesday in which president Jean-Baptiste Kempf shows off the new feature, which uses open-source AI models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages.
Ok now that’s cool. Since it’s often all doom and gloom here, celebrating good tech is a nice change :)
Oh actually not specifically for that, but sounds like it would be possible, maybe make a feature request for it once the vlc ones source is available.
This is something I’m very much behind. I think firefox is doing something similar if i am not mistaken.
One of my favorite shows is a Japanese tv show called GameCenter CX. Fans create subtitles but its a lot of work. Lately they have been using ai to generate subtitles and while some are a bit messed up, you at least get the idea what is going on and they can work off of that if necessary.
At least VLC had a neat table there
They better have had traffic cones on their heads. The mental image that creates is quite funny with the contrast to the serious businesmen trying to sell AI one booth over.
Robert’s interview with the AI home assistant robot guy this year was unintentionally amazing, the dude was dressed like Jordan Peterson (ie. an insane person) but had all the interviewing skills of a parboiled potato. And he had no clue that Robert was clowning on him so hard.
Any chance you could link to this or help me find more stuff from Robert? I am always interested in his takes.
I mostly know of him from Behind the Bastards, a podcast about prominent historical figures (usually 1800s through present). The twist, apart from their regular Christmas “Non-Bastard” episodes is of course that these influential people actually behaved questionably at best during their time. I really think Robert’s research and storytelling are great, he and the guests he brings on really can make an hour fly by sometimes. Most of the biographies are split up into a couple parts, with people like Kissinger and Vince McMahon having such dubious pasts to earn them 6 parts each.
Anyway, the interview with the AI home assistant dude was from another podcast which he frequents, called It Could Happen Here, a more news-oriented podcast. Both of the podcasts can be found on YouTube, published by Cool Zone Media. I believe they did 3 episodes of CES coverage for this year, the final part contained the interview. After all the dunking Robert talks about another interview he had at CES which was a lot more uplifting.
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24339817/vlc-player-automatic-ai-subtitling-translation
Ok now that’s cool. Since it’s often all doom and gloom here, celebrating good tech is a nice change :)
Since VLC is open source, can we expect this AI subtitle generator as a separate product that could be used in, say, jellyfin?
I use subgen to generate my subtitles locally. I have it linked to Bazarr but apparently there’s webhooks for Jellyfin.
This is fantastic, thank you for sharing. I’ve struggled with some media not having suitable subtitles available for download.
Apparently there’s a pluggin for that already: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/discussions/6105
Oh actually not specifically for that, but sounds like it would be possible, maybe make a feature request for it once the vlc ones source is available.
This is something I’m very much behind. I think firefox is doing something similar if i am not mistaken. One of my favorite shows is a Japanese tv show called GameCenter CX. Fans create subtitles but its a lot of work. Lately they have been using ai to generate subtitles and while some are a bit messed up, you at least get the idea what is going on and they can work off of that if necessary.
Firefox has offline translation and image alt-text tagging (for screen readers), but people removeded about it when Mozilla introduced it.
I’m glad people seem broadly receptive of it now that VLC is doing something similar.