1. From daily hobby to a start-up project
SwapBrain’s CEO and founder, Ms. Hung Do, developed an interest in learning natural languages. Apart from her mother tongue, Vietnamese, she can speak English, French, and German considerably well. Plus, she picked up a basic accent of Chinese during her time in Singapore, which is now her favorite foreign language.
Throughout the years, Ms. Do has developed her most vital skill: Machine Learning System Design. She has built various real-time Machine Learning applications that were used widely in many industries. The learning and working experience gave her insight into the future of Machine Learning in the world, which she combined with her hobby of learning Chinese. It dawned on her the idea of building a startup that enables her to make her way in the internal development of apps, which can be extremely helpful shortly when AI dominates the market. When the idea came to reality, PinyinTube is the firstborn product of the company.
2. Streaming experience refresher
PinyinTube is a promising Chrome Extension on Google Chrome that can translate Chinese subtitles into other languages for international viewers who have limited English reading skills and vice versa. For those who can speak Chinese but only in Pinyin format, PinyinTube, as the name is, also runs the Pinyin caption right below the English subtitle. Hence, the application targets specifically both Chinese and English-speaking communities.
According to CEO Do, nowadays every single video on any streaming platform has English subtitles, regardless of their origins. This is, indeed, because English is the most popular language all around the world. Yet this hinders non-English speakers to enjoy the streaming time. Chinese people are heavily affected by this drawback since only 1% of them speak English. Strangely, their native language which remains the second most popular globally, Mandarin, receives much less interest to receive dedicated subtitling applications. It is surprisingly uncommon to see Mandarin appear on the subtitle option list, not to mention Pinyin. This is inexplicable as it does not require much effort to include Pinyin in the subtitle list when it is a friendlier romanization version of Mandarin to non-native speakers. Therefore, PinyinTube is created to solve the problem.
With PinyinTube, a movie lover yourself can widen your video watching options to a new range. Once installed in your web browser, it will bring you a whole new experience when you still can understand Chinese videos with both English and Pinyin captions at the bottom, without having to pause and translate Chinese captions manually. Even for English-based videos, Pinyin still appears on your screen to help you learn English for easier catching-up too.
3. What in your thought?
PinyinTube is a project that we, SwapBrain members, have been investing time and resources on to hopefully break down the boundary between Chinese and English learners. Moreover, we are expanding the project’s covered language beyond only Pinyin. Soon, we will add more languages such as French and German to the options list so users can choose any of their preferred ones for the best streaming experience. When that dream comes true, we may get PinyinTube a new name since its call will not fit anymore ^^.
As a startup, your feedbacks are extremely important for us to modify our project to fit your needs. Do you have any suggestions on what this extension can do? Please leave a comment below and we will be right here to listen to you. One more time, please visit the landing page for more information and waiting for our debut.
Cheers and let’s keep blogging!
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