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YouTube Makes Captioning Available To All

Posted by timothy on from the nation-of-lip-readers-knit-their-eyebrows dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Google's YouTube announced that it has moved its automatic speech-recognition and closed-captioning technology out of beta and has now made it available to the YouTube community at large. Most, if not all, YouTube videos now include a 'CC' button that, if pressed, will automatically generate the closed-captioning technology. The technology processes the audio feed using the speech-recognition technology used in the core voice search feature that has also been built into the Android voice search feature, the GOOG-411 phone search, and other products."

23 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by bennomatic · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Or you'll end up with captions like this:

    Hey glum, Jen tonight. It's apologize for it, interrupting our conversation in early as this afternoon, yes, so I wanted to returning your call and you know check in with you further. Alright, hope you, I hope you're doing well done. Sounded like you, works but alright. Well I'll call me later. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

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    The CB App. What's your 20?
    1. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2, Informative

      Phone audio quality is generally much poorer than online videos, in my experience.

    2. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by bennomatic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      True. I think that Google should put an app on their Android phones that recognizes when someone is connected to a GVoice vmail box, and does the recording and processing locally. I figure that'd make a much more accurate translator.

      --
      The CB App. What's your 20?
    3. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by Mr2001 · · Score: 3, Funny

      My funniest one:

      "Hello voice subscriber what. Hey if you few questions for you. They can feel me 6 like a year like 2 years ago to like forever. Go you came over and I was locked out of the password didnt know the password so much and we wanted. Anybody passed it. I don't know how you guys have a good i just took it out for the first time in years and it says your class is expired. I must be changed and I go to that the windows X P professional you went and dollar dishing whatever it is really old addition, windows 85,001 yet and it's give me a change. Faster screen and says, administrative, which is still around. Funny has got hold us for new password. I confirm you got through. I've any idea what the password again, 30, or if you're more than the who knows no idea what it would've been so if you tell me but sister for you know the next week, otherwise, I was gonna go out to confirm for some a long time, so if you should come pick the and a case."

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      Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
    4. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by TheJokeExplainer · · Score: 5, Informative

      Parent is referring to Google Voice's less-than-perfect voicemail transcription technology which often leads to odd or hilarious transcriptions.

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      visit my pal the xkcd explainer!
    5. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by uncqual · · Score: 2, Interesting
      My most intersting one:

      Hey Hello hello, hi bye hello hello. Bye bye hey hello, test, Hello bye hello. Bye hi hello. Bye, hello hey hey hello hello hello. Bye bye hello. Call hey bye hello hello hello hello hello, hey bye bye bye hello. Bye hello. Bye hello hello. Bye. Hello S hello. Bye bye. Hello. Hello. Yeah, hello. Bye hello hello hello hello, hey, hey, yeah.

      Some of the words hello and bye were dark, the rest were mostly light gray.

      What, one may wonder, was the actual message? Well, it appeared to be someone trying to fax something - although, the tones didn't sound quite like FAX negotiation tones, but surely no one would be mis-dialing a modem number in this day and age.

      I was intrigued by the limited vocabulary it produced here. Almost as if the most common words are these greeting words (hello, hey, hi) and sign off words (bye) and these words are so preferred that line noise ends up just being these top few words.

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      Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
    6. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by jargon82 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'll never forget the time I was playing with dragon (the speech recognition software), and it seemed to pick up an obsession for the word "orange"... Mall was orange. Bus was orange. Elephant was Eggplant, but that's a pointless tale for another time...
      Meanwhile, speech recognition still fails, and google voice is just the worlds best demonstration of why :)

    7. Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. by John+Hasler · · Score: 2, Funny

      I know people for whom the examples in this thread would be accurate transcriptions...

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      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  2. The once and future Deaf accessible internet. by flerchin · · Score: 2, Informative

    Huzzah! Now if we can just get subtitling/captioning on Netflix streams, the net will be accessible to the Deaf again.

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    --why?
    1. Re:The once and future Deaf accessible internet. by aussie_a · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I almost never turn on my speakers and yet I find the internet quite accessible.

      I'm not saying this isn't a great development. But to try to portray the internet as inaccessible to the deaf before now is ridiculous.

  3. Automatically generate the technology? by Mr2001 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Talk about advanced! Back in my day, we had to pay engineers to generate technology for us!

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    Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
    1. Re:Automatically generate the technology? by nebaz · · Score: 2, Funny

      Feeling feeling = Feeling.getFeeling(Feeling.LAUGHTER);
      feeling.express();

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      Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
    2. Re:Automatically generate the technology? by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, Funny

      No! I’m not from Soviet Russia!

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      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  4. Noteable, but still very much experimental by Coopjust · · Score: 3, Informative

    The results are still very funny, especially for non-English speakers.

    However, it's a technology that is still relatively young. One hopes that applying it to Youtube will help Google improve the accuracy.

    However, except for spoken videos with a native English speaker with absolutely no background noise, it's nothing more than a novelty at this point. Trying this on several videos not only yielded hilarious results, but delays of several seconds in some cases.

    1. Re:Noteable, but still very much experimental by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "One hopes that applying it to Youtube will help Google improve the accuracy."

      This, if they allow for corrections it could be an incredibly huge resource of data for google. They'd end up with people spending millions of man hours teaching google how to do voice recognition. And having highly accurate voice recognition would be a boon for society generally.

    2. Re:Noteable, but still very much experimental by crossmr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      and then some company will come along and sue them for not being competitive because they have access to all this great data to make fantastic products other companies can't make.

  5. Interactive Transcripts vs. Captions by syke1911 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm trying to understand the difference between an interactive transcript, as seen at protranscript.com, and a caption. Why did Google go the embedded captioning route? Isn't the goal to create searchable content? If so, captions don't seem to be the solution.

  6. CC this... by flogger · · Score: 5, Funny

    I looked but I can;t find google's CC button for this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw

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  7. Search? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I haven't seen any mention of search, which seems odd. Google is adding captions to every YouTube video, and nobody is interested in whether you'll be able to search the captions or not? Seems to me like it could be quite useful to search the captions of every video on YouTube.

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    main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    1. Re:Search? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 3, Informative

      Indeed; here's an example search showing caption results. I'm just surprised that, of the several articles "covering" this story that I've seen, none have mentioned (even in passing) the applicability of universal captioning to search.

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      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  8. Wish commercial TV stations would use this tech! by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wish this technology would be used by TV stations to provide 'sort of' subtitling for programs that don't have any. This could be helpful for deaf/hearing impaired viewers.

    Where I live (Netherlands), there's a few public TV channels. Most programs on there are subtitled using a dedicated teletext page (888). For the bulk of commercial channels, there's also subtitles for things like prime time movies, and specific (popular) TV shows. But a lot of it is not, like average day time shows / late night documentaries / commercials etc. etc. This is due to manpower/cost issues: you have a limited audience, a limited percentage of viewers that is deaf/hearing impaired, and (proper) subtitling needs humans. Read money = eating into commercial TV stations' bottom line. It's entirely up to these stations to decide what to subtitle, and what not.

    This technology (combined with automated translation) would be a nice complement for those programmes where human-provided subtitling is deemed to expensive. Automated translation is still bad at times, but for deaf/hearing impaired people, subtitles with a bad translation can still be better than no subtitles at all. An automated system shouldn't be very expensive when applied to mass media like national TV, and would be easy to provide for all programmes. And perhaps speech recognition / automated translation would improve over time, to the point where humans aren't needed anymore to get good results.

  9. Let me guess, Youtube.ru by santax · · Score: 4, Funny

    reads the caption and then produces the video?

  10. Now easier to catch unwanted content by Aoet_325 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Soon (now?) they can generate captions of everything heard (or sung) in a video immediately after upload and match the captions against lyrics and transcriptions of copyrighted works or even just search them for specific keywords. Then they can flag those videos as possible copyright violations or even prevent them from being displayed until after being reviewed by someone.

    I'm not saying captioning isn't a good idea, only that it can be used for more than just assisting the hard of hearing.