Google Adds Automatic Captioning to Some YouTube Channels
Google Adds Automatic Captioning to Some YouTube Channels
Posted 11/19/2009 at 6:56pm
| by Pulkit Chandna
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Google is striving to make YouTube friendlier for deaf and hard of hearing people. It today announced the launch of machine-generated automatic captions. But it has chosen to limit the technology to a few YouTube channels for now.
The auto-cap feature has been built on top of the YouTube caption system, and uses the same speech-to-text technology as Google Voice. Though the auto-cap feature is only meant to work with English-language speech, it is possible to automatically translate these automatically-generated captions to 51 different languages.
Another new feature has been added to YouTube in the form of "automatic caption timing." Captions are created using the transcript (text file) uploaded by the user. Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology helps ensure that each word hits precisely the right mark on the timeline, making it easier for users to manually create captions.
"Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions," Google engineer Ken Harrenstien wrote in a post on the Official Google Blog.
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Nocturnius
November 21, 2009 at 11:00am
As a product of hard of hearing/deaf parents I am much more aware of captions than most and realize that,in fact,its still in its infancy.Try turning off the sound for a week or so and just reading the captions.The majority of them are terrible!Their either poorly spelled,incomplete or not in sync with the program,to name a few problems.Downloading video from the net.Forget it...Where does the captioning go when the file format is manipulated?What needs to be in that respect is for a separate "stream" to be created that is irremovable from the rest of broadcast/file.I believe once that is created/instituted then the files themself have the prospect to be encoded/manipulated to different formats without the issue of caption loss,also possibly,multilingually perhaps creating a new job sector or expanding a present one.At any rate,captions still have a long way to go...
Daemon
November 20, 2009 at 12:32am
W00T! This is GREAT News :D -Now if only they did the same thing with other streaming media like over-at Spacecast.com where I get my SG:U fix :P After all I R Proud Deafie and its nice to finally be included in the Streaming Video world.
VaughnG
November 19, 2009 at 11:44pm
This Google feature really is an innovative way to help people with disabilities. Aside from this is a big contribution for marketing, this will also give deaf people to enjoy the media. No need to get cash now for manual translator because there is a machine automated translator now for those people who needs them.
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