In a step to make YouTube videos more accessible to hearing-impaired people and to anyone else who is searching for videos online, Google has launched an automatic video captioning service.Captioned videos are not completely new at YouTube. Google first introduced manual user-generated video captioning 3 years ago, and people have previously used the existing service to caption hundreds of thousands of videos.
However the new auto captioning service will utilize the speech-recognition algorithms used in Google Voice to produce captions automatically.
Ken Harrenstien, the software engineer who created the new "auto-cap" technology, acknowledges that the captions will not always be perfect right now.
But Harrenstien, who is deaf, also predicts that the latest technology will continue to improve over time. "The greater part of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me," he wrote in a Google blog.
At first, the machine-generated captions will be generated in English only, and they will only be visible on 13 partner channels; however Harrenstien suggests that, with machine translation, the captions will ultimately permit people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages."Captions may also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they are looking for," according to Harrenstien.
Beyond the auto-captioning, Google also launched a new service known as automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, aimed at lessening the process of creating captions manually.
"With auto-timing, you no longer want to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create an easy text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out as soon as the words are spoken and create captions for your video," he explains.
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