Get Automatic Captions For Videos On YouTube
In a significant development for deaf and hearing impaired Internet users, Google has announced that videos on YouTube can now automatically generate captions and subtitles in English, with more languages planner in the future. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.
“Google believes that the world’s information should be accessible to everyone,” said Vint Cerf, a Google vice president who has been described as the “Father of the Internet.”
As the Google Blog states, “… we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.”
Another significant launch is that of automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With this, all you need to do, is 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.
Since last year, YouTube users have been able to manually add captions to videos but the feature is not widely used and most content on the site does not have captions. Not surprising given Google’s claims that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
The machine translations come with their share of laughs as the video below illustrates – but expect it to improve over time.
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