Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is partnering with Google Cloud to generate closed captioning for content on the studio’s Max streaming service in the US. WBD will use a new “caption AI” solution that runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to generate speech-to-text for some shows, starting with “unscripted programming.”

The new AI-powered captioning solution can reduce time spent captioning by 80% and cost by 50%, but it would still require human oversight at first.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has agreed a deal with Google Cloud to use the latter's Vertex AI to generate captions for programming across a variety of platforms. WBD claims that its Caption AI system can significantly reduce production time and costs while improving the accuracy of captions for US-based viewers.