We are tremendously excited to announce today that automated Russian and Ukrainian language transcripts for all broadcasts airing on Belarus24, Espreso, 1TV, NTV, Russia 1 and Russia 24 are now available in the Visual Explorer within 30-45 minutes of the Internet Archive's Television News Archive adding a show to its archive! Using Google's Speech-to-Text (STT) API, we generate fully automated transcripts of each broadcast which are then displayed inline in the Visual Explorer along the right-hand side of the thumbnail grid and when clicking on any thumbnail to play the video clip. Combined with Google Chrome's built-in "Translate into English" Google Translate integration, Chrome users can automatically translate these broadcasts into English or any other language in-browser, making these broadcasts accessible to non-Russian and Ukrainian speakers for the first time!
As soon as a broadcast completes, the Internet Archive processes it into its archive, performing a number of tasks such as deriving the source video into an MPEG4 surrogate. Our television processing pipeline currently operates on a 10 minute heartbeat. Within 10 minutes of the Archive completing processing of a broadcast from these six channels, we ingest the MPEG4 file and within 10 minutes after that we run it through Google's Speech-to-Text (STT) API, which takes around 1-2 minutes for a typical broadcast, which is then picked up in our next 10 minute heartbeat and processed into a final consumable transcript ready for display in the Visual Explorer. Thus, 30 minutes after the Archive completes processing of a video, we have it transcribed and ready for display in most cases!