FreeSubtitles exists to allow anyone to transcribe any content from any language into any language. The big idea here is to allow anyone to view any content in any language and to triviliaze language differences. Also, considering its utility, I want to offer free transcription services to democratize access to transcription functionality so that anyone can have access to free and accurate transcriptions. I've driven down the cost of transcription a lot by leveraging open-source technology, so as long as a certain amount of the free users end up purchasing credit the site should be able to scale infinitely until the entire internet has access to free transcription and translation services.
When OpenAI released their Whisper ASR technology as an open-source project I started coding a convenient frontend for myself to use so I didn't have to constantly use the command-line. Eventually I paid for a server so that I could transcribe content more quickly and put up the code online for others to use since I was only using a fraction of the server time for myself. When I posted it online there was huge interest and I've continued to improve the platform from there and adding new features until there was the FreeSubtitles.ai of today.
I have developed FreeSubtitles myself and paid out of pocket for all the server costs. If you like the site please consider purchasing some credit to help ensure the project continues!
Limits have to exist otherwise there would be no equal distribution of access to the site across many users. I am trying to keep a balance between allowing free use and providing a great public service, while allowing equal access to the platform and trying to bring in enough money so the platform can continue to exist.
After uploading your file to the site, it will be transcribed by the Whisper ASR module using the large-v2 (best available) model. Afterwards it will be translated using an open-source Facebook model. You will be able to access the transcription as .srt, .vtt and .txt. For free users the media is deleted after 30m, paid users have permanent storage of media files.
When using the free version of the site, all media are automatically deleted after 30 minutes and all transcriptions are deleted after 24 hours. However, if privacy and security is of the highest importance to you there is functionality to delete the media and transcriptions immediately after the transcription is completed. This deletes the files permanently from the server, so for example please don't ask to have the files recovered because once they are deleted there is no way for this to be done as the files are gone permanently. All files are uploaded in an encrypted manner using SSL. Your data is never looked at unless you request help in debugging an issue with a transcription.
The auto-deletion coupled with the manual immediate deletion is the most secure way to use the platform, both for you and me. Once the transcription is done and you have downloaded it, then there is no use for it to be on the server (unless you are using the built-in player, which is best used with paid use since you can store the files permanently). Therefore, it's better for you and for me if they're deleted quickly as you don't have to risk your data being on a server and I don't have to risk storing files that I don't know their content. Paid users can store their files permanently for convenience and for use of the built-in player but also have access to the immediate deletion functionality. Each transcription is given a unique URL built using the filename and a unique timestamp and the site is protected by Cloudflare to protect against any brute-force methods of finding the unique URL.
FreeSubtitles.ai aims to have as close to perfect transcriptions as possible but with the current AI technology and the wide language support sometimes there are inaccuracies. I am constantly fine-tuning the technology to try to have a general solution that works as accurately as possible for as much content as possible, but if you feel that the transcription had too much inaccuracy please let me know so I can take a look and see if there was something I could have implemented on my end to produce a better result.
FreeSubtitles.ai has completed 394,861 transcriptions combining to 124,320 hours transcribed (7,459,184 minutes).
Yes there is in fact, you can watch it here: