YouTube turns on captions on millions of videos
YouTube is adding captions to millions of Internet videos.
The feature unveiled Thursday expands upon speech-recognition technology that YouTube began using to make captions available on a limited number of videos late last year.
YouTube’s audience will be able to request captions at the press of a button. Video producers will also be able to download the automated captions and improve upon them.
For now, YouTube’s captioning tool will only work on videos with English audio, although there are plans to include more languages. The English audio, however, can be translated into 50 different languages. YouTube, owned by Google, is the Web’s most popular video site. Its users upload about 28,800 hours of video each day.
Of course, the speech recognition technology is not perfect, and will get better over time. This same technology is currently in use with Google Voice, a reincarnation of GrandCentral.
See a sample video below where the captions have been machine transcribed:
As you can see, I was speaking very clearly and slowly and the technology still was not that great. This has a long way to go, but it is definitely something to stay tuned to.
