A new feather in YouTube's cap: automagic auto-captioning!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 05 March 2010 10:56

Your IT - Entertainment

If you've ever wanted YouTube videos to offer text captioning of whatever is being spoken, whether for accessibility reasons or because you want to follow the action without needing to increase the volume, go ogle YouTube's latest feature: auto-captioning!

Taking advantage of Google's amazing advances in voice recognition technology, YouTube has today launched an automatic captioning service for YouTube videos that works in English, while also having the Babelfish-like feature of offering automatic translations from English into any one of 50 different languages.

Representing one of the 'largest accessibility projects of its kind', Google and YouTube happily boast that the new development will 'open up millions of YouTube videos to people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing', with language translation also an amazing feature in itself.

YouTube's official blog posting described the development thus: 'One in six Australians is affected by hearing loss and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015.

'To address a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a time-consuming and complicated process.  

'Making video easily accessible is something YouTube is working hard to address. One of the first steps the YouTube team took was the development of a caption feature in 2008. In November of last year the YouTube released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners.

'Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers will have the ability to choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages -- all in just a couple of clicks.'

There's plenty more detail on YouTube's new automagic captioning service, including details on where it will - and won't - work. Please read on to page 2!