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 so much distributed 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 English, 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.