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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."

12 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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    1. 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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    2. 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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    3. 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 :)

  2. 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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  3. 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.

  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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.

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

    reads the caption and then produces the video?