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The corpus

The index is built from a curated list of channels, not from open crawling. A daily run walks those channels, pulls each candidate's automatic captions, aligns them, scores the clip, and writes it to the index.

What gets in

A candidate has to clear every gate:

GateThresholdWhy
Captions presentrequiredEvery learning feature is built on word timings. No captions, no clip
Durationup to 180 sShort form. Long videos are a different product
Words spokenat least 25Filters music, montages and silent clips
Speech density0.9 words per second and upA clip where someone actually talks
Safety and topic screeningmodel reviewedCurated corpus, usable next to a child account
New vocabularyat least one word not already saturatedStops the index filling with the same hundred words

Clips that fail are recorded with a reason rather than forgotten, so a later run does not re-download them and a threshold change can be replayed against them.

What that costs you in expectations

  • The corpus is curated, not exhaustive. A word can be common in the language and absent here. GET /words tells you which words are covered before you build a feature that assumes one.
  • It grows daily and is not a frozen dataset. Clip counts for a word go up over time.
  • It shrinks occasionally, when an uploader deletes a video. Clip ids are stable; the video behind one is not guaranteed forever.

Languages

English is indexed today. Adding a language is a data job, not a code change: a levelled word list, glosses, a channel list, then a corpus run. GET /corpus is the live answer to what is available; nothing in the API assumes English.

Metadata only. Playback runs on YouTube, through your own embed.