Google Introduce Automatic Captions for YouTube

Today Google introduced a new feature on YouTube, Automatic Captions. This will enable users to get captions on any video uploaded onto YouTube. To enable captions; simply click on the bottom right of a video and click on the CC button. YouTube is using the technology from Google Voice to automatically create the captions. See below for a quote from the Official Google Blog:

“To help address this challenge, 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. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. 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. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks….”

Related Links: Google Blog, YouTube