YouTube has introduced some pretty interesting technologies which enable users to add automatic text captions to the videos. The feature is only available in several channels for now, as the speech recognition technology it uses isn’t exactly perfect but Google says it should improve in time. The video site had enabled users to upload their own captions for about a year now, but the process is time consuming and only a few users have taken advantage of the feature until now.
“Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands,” Ken Harrenstien, a Google software engineer working on the features, wrote.
“However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale…To help address this challenge, we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short,” he added.
There are several related features being introduced at the same time, but the most interesting, albeit the most underdeveloped, is the automatic captions technology. For the videos on which the feature has been made available, users can use the rig… (read more)