Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Google Announced, Video clips on YouTube to have automatic captions

Google Inc. on Thursday announced that video clips on YouTube, the popular video-sharing website it bought in 2006, will soon include machine-generated automatic captions.

The automatic captions will be added for videos through the combination of Google’s automatic speech recognition technology with the YouTube caption system.

In addition to automatic captions, Google said it is adding another feature called “auto-timing,” which enables YouTube users to create a simple text file with all the words in a video, leaving Google technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create corresponding captions.

Both features will be available in English by the end of this week with automatic captions initially visible only on a handful of YouTube’s partner channel.

As On Google Official Blog:

Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we’ve introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. 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.

Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.

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