Google adds automatic captions to YouTube

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 20 Nov 2009 at 09:47

Google has introduced a new technology to YouTube that can automatically add captions to videos using speech recognition.

The search giant introduced the ability to add captions manually a year ago, but it's a time-consuming process, requiring users to pen their text and then add it at the correct point in the the video.

However, Google intends to address this limitation by bringing the technology used in Google Voice - its voicemail to email service - to the video-sharing site.

The Transcribe Audio feature option appears under the caption menu in the lower right-hand corner of video panel. Once activated the feature adds machine-generated captions to the videos.

Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for

"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," says Google Software Engineer, Ken Harrenstien on the company blog.

"Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for," he adds.

Harrenstein has admitted that the service isn't perfect, with transcription often patchy and currently limited to specific video categories - but he claims it can only get better with time.

Alongside the machine transcription tool, Google is also introducing an "automatic caption timing" service. "All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video," explains Harrenstein.