YouTube may be one of the biggest success stories of the Web 2.0 era, but if you are hearing impaired, the site is only of limited value. Starting today, however, Google will begin to offer auto-captioning for all English-language videos on YouTube. Until now, only videos from a select number of YouTube’s partners were captioned using the Google’s automated speech-recognition software.
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As Google notes, there will be over 700 million people who suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. As more and more content on the Web moves towards video, it’s commendable to see that Google is working to make more of this content accessible to its users. Thanks to Google’s translation technology, these captions can also be translated into over 50 different languages.
It will surely take a while before this feature becomes available on all videos. After all, over 20 hours of video are now being uploaded to YouTube every minute. Whenever auto-captioning is available, however, you can simply click on the captions link underneath the video and turn the caption on.
Google notes that its speech-recognition algorithms are obviously not perfect. If you spot a mistake in one of your own videos, however, you can easily download the captions and correct the error.
Here are the current requirements for enabling auto-captioning on your YouTube videos:
- While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
- Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
- Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.