The Future of Global Accessibility: 3Play Media’s Human-AI Hand-in-Hand Approach

From AI-powered translation to custom dubbing services, 3Play Media’s team achieves machine speeds without losing the human touch.

Written by Conlan Carter
Published on Jan. 13, 2025
Photo: 3PlayMedia
Photo: 3PlayMedia
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Sometimes, working in tech feels more like science fiction than tangible reality.

This feeling of near-incomprehensible accomplishment washed over a crowd of 3Play Media team members rapt with awe as they witnessed the company’s first-ever video dubbed with an AI-generated, translated voice. Like something out of Star Trek, the 3Play Media product successfully, quickly and inexpensively translated and recorded replacement speech with uncanny accuracy — effectively removing a language barrier.

Although the product is still a century away from the handheld, instant alien language translators found on Starfleet vessels, 3Play’s AI Dubbing tool was the result of meticulous, careful and collaborative work. Its premiere — alongside other AI-powered language and accessibility tools like 3Play Media’s Audio Description and Localization — symbolized a combined victory between the company’s mission to upgrade accessibility and globalization and a workplace culture that values every team member as a hands-on collaborator.

Senior Vice President of Engineering Dan Caddigan, whose involvement in these initiatives began with building the foundational dubbing editor, noted that the premiere of the first AI Dubbing video was an unforgettable experience for the entire company, especially since nearly every person at the company had a hand in bringing it to life.

“It was one of those electric moments where you could feel the entire company collectively realize ‘Wow, we really built this,’” said Caddigan. 

With a highly configurable and refined workflow system wherein human translators and editors review and interact with AI-generated content, 3Play Media’s accessibility and localization products are a new species of modern technology. By combining human and AI input into smart organizational tools, 3Play can produce video translations, descriptions and more with significantly reduced budget or time requirements.

 

Enhancing Accessibility with Audio Description

Constraints like turnaround time are critical obstacles to much-needed accessibility services, and for Senior Director of Data Science Mike Chalson, his team’s work on 3Play Media’s Audio Description tool represents a direct answer to the ever-present need for accessibility services and the power of technology to make those services more available.

Audio description — a narrative audio track that can supplement and serve as a replacement for video content for low-vision users — already existed in 3Play’s suite of products, but as accessibility regulations change and video content becomes more common in online spaces, Chalson and his colleagues saw a need for a better solution. By pulling together a cross-functional team of web app developers, product managers and audio description operations experts, they aimed to create a product that was more flexible — one that didn’t need to sacrifice quality for faster and cheaper service.

The process itself was highly iterative, especially since 3Play’s AI-supported products include essential human resources in the form of specialized experts, and updates to the Audio Description product were rolled out in a controlled environment before being released into the live workflows of busy human describers. Each round of iteration was carefully observed by every stakeholder in the project, including key feedback from the humans working within the tool. The successful sophistication of the product, according to Chalson, is the direct result of 3Play Media’s practical approach to collaborative work.

“We achieved great results by first recognizing that each department consisted of world-class experts of different aspects of the business problem,” said Chalson.

 

“We achieved great results by first recognizing that each department consisted of world-class experts of different aspects of the business problem.”

 

One notable upgrade to the tool is the integration of a new on-demand optical character recognition, a type of image recognition software that helps the AI tool convert visible objects into machine-readable text. This cutting-edge technology allows 3Play’s tool to generate a head start for the human experts who refine the generated audio descriptions, increasing overall description speed.

 

READ MORE: What Is Image Recognition?

 

Among the successes of the upgraded Audio Description product is a confirmation of the culture that keeps the 3Play Media team improving alongside their services. With an “everybody codes” mentality, everyone on the team has a hands-on mindset for tackling complex issues and a genuine sense of appreciation for the opinions and hard work of their collaborators, especially those from other departments.

“Part of 3Play's magic is our ability to bring together small groups of motivated, creative, generous and humble professionals from multiple disciplines,” said Chalson.

 

A sitting area in 3Play Media’s office, featuring a sunny view of the street outside.
Photo: 3PlayMedia

 

Meeting the Demand for Localization

It may not be too difficult to imagine that translation services, especially those that include custom subtitling and dubbing, typically require a significant amount of work to execute. Beyond the process of translating, transcribing, recording and editing new versions of video content, customers looking for these services often request adjustments or customizations — all while maintaining high quality and the fastest turnaround time possible.

As the lead of 3Play’s globalization team, Principal Software Engineer Nathanael Beisiegel sees the improvements in 3Play’s AI Localization tools as the direct result of customer demand. Customers access localization services by outlining the goals, tone, audience, format and more from 3Play’s platform, which is designed to integrate into customer’s pre-existing workflows for easy management. They can even make additional custom requests and provide feedback throughout the process.

What makes a seemingly Herculean demand on 3Play’s localization experts doable is the custom-built AI Dubbing Editor, an internal tool that allows linguists to review and edit AI-generated translation and voice audio to incorporate a higher-quality, nuanced video that emulates traditional translation and dubbing services in a fraction of the time.

From Beisiegel’s perspective, building internal editors from scratch is well worth the investment as it keeps the team’s translation backlog and product roadmap as flexible as possible when meeting the growing needs of customers.

“Having our own tooling allows us to guarantee all of this without being locked into any shortsighted direction. It allows us to always provide state-of-the-art dubs, done correctly,” said Beisiegel.

 

“Having our own tooling … allows us to always provide state-of-the-art dubs, done correctly.”

 

The building of this editor alongside the upgraded localization services was a much anticipated and highly collaborative project, one made easier with familiarity as 3Play Media works with several internal editors, all built in tandem with the AI Dubbing Editor. As teams switched gears to offer feedback or insights to other teams on their own changes, they helped to accelerate each other’s products with key lessons learned from their own builds.

“Seeing the team happy and rapidly building amazing things is a delight, and feels like a great validation of initial architecture,” said Beisiegel.

 

A Workplace Without Egos

Part of what takes time to create modern translation services, especially for video content, is the number of people involved, from linguists to data scientists. Considering 3Play’s quick delivery model and AI-human translation style, the potential for high-pressure issues or conflicting expert opinions is high. 

For a product like AI Dubbing, which pulled together multiple teams from across the organization, Caddigan noted the organizational shift from a traditional agile methodology to the “Shape Up” process — an approach to shipping software in six-week blocks coined by software company 37signals — had a significant positive impact on the development process. Combining this with steady stakeholder input, 3Play developers could deep dive into their work over a digestible length of time, hand-in-hand with expert contributors.

Underscoring all of this remarkable collaborative work is 3Play Media’s cultural emphasis on egolessness in everything they do. Leadership regularly gets into the weeds with their teams, coding alongside them. 

It may take a village to deliver a truly remarkable product, but according to Beisiegel, 3Play team members have the maturity to trust in one another to bring the same selflessness, curiosity and passion to creating some of the most futuristic tools on the market today. After building their own tools to get the job done their way, this team understands that the quality of the humans behind the technology is paramount to their success thus far.

“It's not about picking your favorite tools — it's about strong emotional intelligence,” said Beisiegel.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity. Images provided by 3Play Media.