From captions to expansion: Growth Tribe makes digital education accessible to all
With a mission to democratize digital learning, Growth Tribe is one of Europe’s leading digital education partners. Based in Amsterdam, it specializes in data science, growth, innovation and customer experience. The company empowers learners to acquire the most in-demand digital skills through fun, hands-on courses and programs.
In 2023, Growth Tribe made a bold decision to switch from live classes to on-demand videos to better reach learners everywhere.
Challenge
But they didn’t stop there. With such an eclectic, diverse network of learners spanning different nationalities and timezones, video alone wasn’t going to cut it. Growth Tribe content would also need audio-to-text assistance.
“Our end goal was to increase accessibility to all our courses by adding English closed captioning, but the subjects we teach are not easily auto generated by a tool. There are lots of complex terms that require context.”
The Growth Tribe team needed a cost-effective yet highly accurate subtitling provider with quick turnaround times. They landed on Happy Scribe after thorough market research. It ticked all the boxes.
At this point, the Growth Tribe team was concerned that they were going to have to manually transcribe every course to ensure the quality was up to par. However, they quickly saw that option would be far too time consuming.
Manual transcription typically takes five hours for every hour of video. The sheer volume of content made manual transcription too costly in terms of time spent. They would need to find a solution that would get them to 100% accuracy—sometime this century.
“Even one small mistake separates good content from great content. Fixing mistakes in automatic captioning is time consuming; we wanted to reduce our workload.”
The Growth Tribe team knew that subtitles were essential to make their courses digestible — and accessible — but time to scale was a big issue. The team had migrated its courses to Vimeo, a video-hosting platform. They tried Vimeo’s automatically generated subtitles, but the quality just didn’t pass muster.
Solution
“We chose Happy Scribe because it was the best price on the market for what it promised: high-speed subtitles without sacrificing quality.”
They started small at first and tried Happy Scribe’s Human-Made Subtitles service to create closed captions in English for their core leadership course. Powered by professional subtitlers, Growth Tribe received its captions with an impeccable degree of accuracy in less than 24 hours — no easy feat for video content replete with complex marketing jargon.
Pro Tip: One way to make sure your specialized terminology gets integrated correctly into your subtitles is to add it to My Vocabulary.
The Growth Tribe team was so happy that it used Happy Scribe to caption all eleven courses in English, and is now also using the service to generate foreign subtitles in Dutch. They optimize and reupload course content every three months and translate it into Dutch in order to connect with a wider audience in the Netherlands.
“The subtitles were well within the 99% accuracy, so we were happy with that. We then used Happy Scribe’s internal editing features to fix the 1%. It saved unimaginable time.”
Luckily, we don’t have to use our imaginations—we’ve got the numbers. The Growth Tribe team has now subtitled approximately 130 hours of video using Happy Scribe.
If they had done this manually, that would have taken 650 hours, or, put another way, four straight months with the subtitler working 40 hours/week—and that’s just for the English subtitles. The translation on top of that would have added several more months of work!
How does Happy Scribe do it?
Over the years, Happy Scribe has developed its own AI language model trained on input from professional linguists. Nowadays, these AI-generated subtitles already provide 85% accurate subtitles in just 5 minutes.
Happy Scribe’s professionals already have their work cut out for them when they take the AI-generated subtitles and polish them up in order to reach the 99% accuracy. Working this way saves time and, as a result, lowers the cost of subtitling overall.
They have come to rely on Happy Scribe for its speedy service and broad portfolio of languages available for translation. The team can send content to Happy Scribe’s translators around the clock and trust that 99% of the work is already done.
Benefits
“The experience was great from the start. We were happy with the results and the turnover was super quick! That’s the reason Happy Scribe is the first and only company we have worked with to create human subtitles for all our course content.”
Growth Tribe’s journey taking e-learning content from simply available to truly accessible shows how Happy Scribe can be a great partner for companies seeking to subtitle extensive digital learning libraries with little effort and zero sacrifice in terms of quality.
In addition, by translating English content into Dutch, they are able to cater to a larger number of learners, thus expanding across the Netherlands with minimal effort from their internal team. This means all the content that Growth Tribe has processed within Happy Scribe is only one click away from being translated into any language, facilitating growth and internationalization.
Results
All Growth Tribe e-courses are now 100% accessible and the team has more time on its hands to do what it does best: create digital gurus and future-proofed professionals.
The company was able to scale its subtitling projects to introduce new and exciting courses to the online curriculum.
What’s more, the company now caters to a more diverse student base and learning resources are more inclusive, thereby significantly lowering the barrier to their educational offerings.
Cristina G
Cristina G is a former journalist who transitioned into PR and Communications before diving into growth marketing and ultimately product marketing. She loves learning and writing about how HappyScribe customers use the product to achieve their goals.