So we're here in Google Plus Hangout on the air.
I'm Eric Mack, managing editor of Crowdsourcing.org,
and also, in the hangout, we've got Nicholas Neville,
who is co-founder and executive director
of Amara, and, before we talk about what we're doing here today, maybe to get us started,
Nicholas, explain a little bit about what Amara is and what you guys do.
NICHOLAS: Sure. Nice to be here.
Uh... So, Amara.org is a subtitling, captioning - subtitling and captioning platform,
and what really makes it unique, I think, is that we're really knocking down
a bunch of the barriers that make captions and subtitles so difficult to
create and so rare for online video.
And, so, we have what I think is the easiest to use and I hope most enjoyable
subtitling interface anywhere.
We're also compatible with lots of sites.
You can bring your YouTube video, Vimeo video, HTML file,
DailyMotion video,
tour a site,
add captions and subtitles.
But, most importantly, we're making it possible for a lot of people to collaboratively work on
creating captions and subtitles, and we think that the only way that you can
get captioning and subtitling done on thousands and millions of web videos is if you ask the
viewers to participate, and I think it is really a Wikipedia-type problem -
something that's so huge in scale and requires to much good expertise
that we need to bring people from around the world
in to help make video accessible.
And we got started because we were looking at online video;
looking at web video, and realising how important captions and subtitles were for
people that have access, and yet, how rare they were, and, so, right now, we work with a bunch of
education companies - and I can talk more about that - but they're creating videos of educational courses
and sending those around the world for peple to watch.
But, if you don't speak Emglish, you need a way to have... You need a way to watch, you need
a way to understand that.
Amara makes that possible by inviting viewers, by inviting students,
to help translate the videos into dozens and over a hundred languages.