Automatic Generation of Audio Descriptions for Sports Programs

The Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) has developed a means of automatically generating auxiliary audio descriptions from metadata for use in live TV sports programs. Audio description services are important for helping visually impaired persons enjoy TV programs, but such services are currently available for only a handful of programs because many studio resources and personnel are required to create audio descriptions, and it is especially difficult to produce such descriptions during live broadcasts. The method described in this paper has the potential to overcome these obstacles. The system that we constructed for the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games consists of commentary text generation and text-to-speech (TTS) processes. The commentary text generation process generates commentary appropriate to the situation for each piece of event data accepted by the system, and the TTS part converts it into natural speech. We ran the system during the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games, and it provided both caption and audio descriptions for more than 2,000 sporting contests.