Internet giant Youtube just turned on its caption option for millions of videos in its database. The popular video site will be using the speech-recognition technology that they have been testing on some of their videos since last year.
With this feature, a youtube user or viewer can request caption withing a single click of a button while video owners can download the automated captions and improve upon them.
Google engineer Mike Cohen said: “I have been working on speech technology for 25 years. There have been steady improvements and this is the culmination of lots of work over years and years.
“We have had to work on a wide variety of problems like accent variation, background noise, the variation in language, in pronunciation.”
This new feature will surely benefit people with hearing problems.
I think they launched it too soon. They should have put a HUGE ‘beta’ tag to it. For me the transcription sucks, it’s as bad as their Google voice transcription. Have you tried captions for any song or any ‘non-american’ speaker? Just look at some TED talks.
I don’t think they had to really turn the captions on. They wanted related text for the videos so that they can generate better ads, but they didn’t really have to share the text with everyone. Their STT technology is not mature yet to be released in public domain, but it’s google, they like ‘beta’ releases
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That’s new thing and a good one too. I think it to be a very positive move.
So now youtube user have more and more choice for viewing the video. the database is so huge that i love it
Hey that’s a very good move to go handy with the changing technologies. This innovation would definitely draw more traffic to youtube as in my opinion none of the other video browsing site have this facility. By the way thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware about this…
While Google stresses the benefits to the hearing impaired, I think the bigger motivation here is improving video search. By converting speech to text, that text can then be used to index the videos for providing better search results. Many (most?) YouTube user don’t include much of a title or description with their uploads, and auto-captioning will automatically tag each video with valuable text that will be used in the search index.
This is a big deal.
I would go as far as to say this is why Google acquired YouTube in the first place. Google has always been about search. But Google needs text for its search index. Auto speech-to-text is the final piece of the video search puzzle. Which makes you wonder — if Google is able to “auto-caption” YouTube videos, are they doing same thing behind the scenes for other videos services, to improve their video search index at videos.google.com? There is no reason they can’t do this, and it would represent a massive improvement in video search.
I love YouTube’s captions/transcripts on videos but I think they still need human editors. The machine transcriptions are already becoming a laughing stock online. Just have a look at the screenshot above where Eric Schmidt is the “Chief Executive Officer of Goodwill”