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YouTube Adds Auto-Captioning

Making life easier for both the hearing impaired and video search engines alike, YouTube can now automatically generate captions and subtitles for videos in English. At present, the feature is only enabled on a handful of partner channels, but Google plans to make it available to everyone eventually. YouTube now is also offering an "automatic caption timing" feature for all new uploads, which is designed to makes it easier to add captions manually.

Users can upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google's speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information. YouTube's users currently upload over 20 hours of video every minute, and most of this video isn't accessible for users with hearing impairments. While uploaders could always add captions to their videos manually, only a small percentage ever did.

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1 comment about "YouTube Adds Auto-Captioning ".
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  1. Alejandro Sacasa, November 19, 2009 at 3:59 p.m.

    Considering Google's capabilities in language translation, this auto-captioning feature is an important first step towards adding subtitles for foreign content, which would really open up the market for such producers and drive more traffic to YouTube.

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