M+E Daily

Digital Nirvana announced an upgrade to its Trance self-service SaaS application. Trance 4.0 works within a media company’s own workflow to generate transcripts, closed captions/subtitles, and translations automatically for content localisation. Both enterprises and individual users will benefit from new features and capabilities, including elaborate account management, modular rights for users, and an advanced pro-captioning window.

Major changes in terms of user experience are broadly classified into the following categories:

Modular Application: Now the application can be used as a combined or individual tool for transcription, captioning, text localisation, or conformance of existing captions.

Transcription: The new and improved transcription window can now be used as a stand-alone app instead of being part of a three-step transcription, captioning, and subtitling workflow that only generates output after all steps are complete. Users can upload media assets and quickly gain access to highly accurate, time-coded, speaker-segmented, automatic transcripts in the transcription window in real time. In addition to media and entertainment content, users can now get interviews, meetings, podcasts, and more quickly transcribed, reviewed, and exported in different formats.

Captioning: The pro-captioning window has undergone a major change to make it both user-friendly and efficient. Machine-generated time-codes can now be adjusted using spectrogram and manual inputs. It is now possible to ingest predefined sound cues, import custom vocabularies, view frames, and import guidelines to view across the organisation. The stand-alone pro-captioning window will allow users to upload media, generate automatic captions, and display in the pro-captioning widow using the desired presets defined by the user or the organisation.

Text Localisation: An extension of the pro-captioning window, text localisation can now be used as a Trance module to focus on localising captions. Users can now import existing captions and quickly use the machine translation feature to generate highly accurate localised text specifically designed for subtitling purposes. Then they can review it side by side and export in various formats. Users can also create different presets for various languages since localisation varies from language to language. This capability helps enterprises easily localise both legacy and new content and extend the content to a wider audience.

Caption Conformance: This application enables users to import text with new presets to conform with various publishing platforms. In addition, the application will automatically review the text and highlight any nonconformities with the selected guidelines. For example, if a user wants to publish content on Netflix, they can import the caption file, and the system will generate a time-coded alert against each nonconformity, enabling the user to quickly navigate to each instance and correct it. This helps enterprises avoid rejections from the publishing platform.

Management Functions: Digital Nirvana has upgraded the dashboard for better real-time visibility into which users are online and the progress of jobs. Administrators now have better management controls, including the ability to define user hierarchy, monitor user performance, and grade users. They can also see commercial usage in real time, add multiple projects with different presets, and upload custom vocabulary, among many other capabilities.

User Control: Users now have more control over processing jobs, including the ability to choose from available jobs, import a transcript, and create captions in existing or new presets if required. There’s also speaker differentiation, single-click access to pre-defined sound cues, options for a personal dictionary, the ability to precisely time captions by moving the spectrograph or overwriting manually in the caption window, easy-access icons on the top array, and advanced position controls.

Assigning Internal and External Tasks in the Same Application: Enterprises are now able to use Trance 4.0 to both assign work items to internal staff and to share work items with Digital Nirvana’s service team to receive fully qualified, human-curated output using the same application. This eliminates the need to go to multiple places for data sharing.

Also, in an industry first, Digital Nirvana has implemented machine learning- and NLP-based presets to segment transcripts accurately into captions.

“Our customers asked, and we delivered. With this release, we’ve given Trance a major upgrade in capabilities and user experience,” said Russell Vijayan, director of product at Digital Nirvana. “With advanced management controls, real-time monitoring of online users, better visibility into commercial usage and status of jobs, access to advanced security, and so much more, users will see a significant boost in both efficiency and experience.”

Trance 4.0 is scheduled for release in September. Existing users will be notified when the upgrade is ready. New users will see the updated interface while onboarding.