YouTube to Auto-Caption all Videos

The Internet is such an easy place to play that it’s easy to forget that some are forced to struggle in it. People with hearing impairments are one obvious example–there’s a lot of sound in the online environment, and not experiencing that sound makes the Internet a less enjoyable place to be. YouTube’s been working to overcome that problem by allowing captioning of videos. It is now going one step further and implementing auto-captioning on all video uploads.

Auto-captioning, which will at present be restricted to English language videos, uses speech recognition to create an automatic transcription using the voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice. Videos, once uploaded, will be available to a wider audience of people than before. And YouTube is aiming beyond just those with hearing impairments. It sees this feature as useful for making English language content available to non-English speakers.

It looks like YouTube will apply auto-captioning retroactively–to all the English language videos in its collection. (Video owners can speed up this process by running their videos through the auto-captioning process.) And, YouTube’s goal is to expand the reach of auto-captioning to include other languages. Still, the technology is in its infancy, and YouTube suggests some patience with the transcriptions–they aren’t foolproof just yet.

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