Nov 19 2009

Google Announces Automatic Captions in YouTube

Wow. For those of you who are not in the know, I’m hearing impaired. I’ve lived with a steady diet of closed captioning for most of my life. When the internet first came around it was primarily text and pictures which made the intertubes easy to enjoy despite the slow speeds. However with the advent of greater bandwidth came video blogs, and the mumblers of the internet were able to strike a heavy blow against those with my impairment.

Then Google came to the rescue.

They’ve developed technology that will automatically scan videos and allow me to view them with captions, whether or not people meant for it to be that way. And as they say in the article, since it’s computer-based, this also means that we will be able to use Google’s translators to have subtitles for videos in any language.

Now the technology is not perfect. In the article they have an example of how the transcription has gone hilariously wrong. Again, Google has provided a way to help with that as well. Upload a text file with the transcription already in it, and Google will use their technology to match your text file up with the timing of the speaker.

I’m so excited for this technology! I can’t wait for it to be fully implemented.

via The Official Google Blog.

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