AfterDawn: News

YouTube adds captions to videos

YouTube has announced the launch of automatically generated captions for all its streaming videos, a new feature that should help both deaf users, and those who want subtitles for videos in other languages.

Google software engineer Ken Harrenstein, who has been blogging about the eventual launch of the captions, showed off the new feature at a press conference. Harrenstein is deaf, and says the company has been working on the project since 2005.



Automatic captioning has been available to a small number of groups since last year, but the feature has now gone wide.

Researcher Mike Cohen says "the captioning technology blends Google's speech-recognition and translation algorithms."

The technology continues to improve daily, getting better at factoring in accents, and canceling out background noise.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 5 Mar 2010 13:01

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• 3 comments

• nonoitall

  Tried it out yesterday. Could still use some work... :-D

  5.3.2010 16:12 #1

• videows

  This is certainly a welcome addition. especially useful where the audio is not clear or if a video is in a foreign language. Hope YouTube users will exploit this feature for the benefit of other users.

  10.3.2010 08:13 #2

• champman

  What I've done with my videos where there is a lot of talking, I've added subtitles at video production stage rather than added as an after thought.
  
  A nice step in the right direction and Youtube/Google are getting very clever. Would be interesting if it could make out my friends great accent which is very broad Scottish.

  11.3.2010 21:09 #3