Automatic Captions In YouTube

on 11/19/2009, filed in Home > General

It looks like Google has just made YouTube a lot more accessible to dead and hearing-impaired people. With automatic captions (auto-caps) in YouTube, captions can be processed through Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to offer automatic captions to the videos. It uses the same voice recognition algorithms used in Google Voice. Of course, the captions certainly won’t be perfect, but we’re sure they’ll be a big help. It’s currently only able to insert captions on English language speech, but Google has been cool enough to offer users the choice to use its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages, now how cool is that? Check out the official details here.

Google: Google is an Internet Search company with profits mainly derived from its AdWords advertising program. Google is also known for other high-profile web-related products such as Chrome, GMail, Google Docs or Google Map, and it has also made a very successful entry into the mobile handset market with its Android mobile operating system. The company was created in 1998 and went public in 2004. Google is one of the most visited site in the world.

YouTube: is a video-sharing website where users can upload videos. It is currently (7/2012) the largest such site, and was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who all worked at PayPal before. While it mainly featured movies from regular folks (and some illegal user uploads) at the beginning, but eventually YouTube grabbed enough market share to attract higher quality content over the years. Now, there is something for everyone, and YouTube continues to push for high-quality content, while keeping the support from amateur video-makers. The company was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.6B.

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