Lazybug

Adaptive learning subtitles for Chinese TV

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December 3, 2021 ML and NLP algorithm feature complete for MVP

The first 7 months of working on zimu.ai I spent completely on R&D for two core value propositions:

  1. Have the ability to extract hard subs from any video
  2. Segment Chinese captions into words, produce accurate pinyin romanization, and accurate in-context translations for each word

Number 2 was surprisingly difficult, especially getting in-context word translations to work reliably. It's still not certain that the work I put into this will pay off, but I think so. Chinese is a highly ambiguous language, so trying to reduce that ambiguity, and thus the cognitive load of the learner will be valuable I hope.

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Learning Chinese I found it too difficult to watch Chinese TV, despite abundant hard-subs. So I built OCR to extract them and automatically translate words so that I can learn from pretty much any video out there.