Comment by aitchnyu
2 years ago
We need the concept of user agents for our media. Like we prevent ads and enhance fonts for the web, remove pauses for podcasts, compress audio so dialog is intelligible, our video players should remove non-speech parts of subtitles and delay punchlines till they are spoken.
If these things were done properly by the studios, a user agent wouldn't be necessary. I've watched current TV shows with subtitles (official ones, not fan-made) and they had obvious spelling errors in them. Subtitles are a separate track, and the time they're displayed is set in the track info; showing the subtitle at just the right moment is well within their capability, but they just don't care.
But yeah, you're right: someone's probably going to eventually come up with an AI user agent that tries to do these things automatically.