| YouTube adds captions to millions of Internet videos |
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05/03/2010 13:41 (708 Day 14:24 minutes ago) | |||||
The FINANCIAL -- YouTube on March 4 announced that it is adding captions to millions of Internet videos. The feature will apply to English language videos but YouTube said it plans to broaden auto-captioning coverage to include 50 different languages.
The closed-captioning means that millions of users who are hard of hearing, deaf, or simply speak another language as their primary language can now have a greater access to YouTube videos, the company said, PC Mag com reports. "A core part of YouTube's DNA is access to content," said Hunter Walk, the product team lead for YouTube. "From day one, that's what we were hoping to do with video."
The Google-owned company said this use of speech recognition technology is probably the biggest experiment of its kind online, according to BBC. Previously captions were only on a small amount of content. "A core part of YouTube's DNA is access to content," said the firm's product manager Hunter Walk.
The same source reports that YouTube said by opening all this content to those who have not really been able to access it in the past should democratise information and "help foster greater collaboration and understanding". Initially the feature will apply to English language videos, with other languages being added in the coming months.
Google stressed that the roll-out of the service is only just beginning, and that the automatic software is imperfect, according to Guardian. Video owners will be allowed to download the transcript for their content and then improve them where necessary. Based on the technology that powers Google Voice Search, the captions will be most accurate if the video provides a clear audio track, but will, the company promises, be improved “every day”.
The same source reports that a button will allow users to request that existing videos be auto-captioned as soon as possible, and once they have been processed the captions will be available at the click of a button at the bottom right of the video player.
"This is huge," said Ken Harrenstien, a software engineer at Google and one of the project's leaders, PC Mag com informs. "You can go to any video online and now you can see some captions. It's not perfect; we know it's not perfect. Sometimes it's funny. But I love it."
The technology behind speech recognition has been around for about 50 years, said Google engineer Mike Cohen, and has finally become good enough to be used on a large scale, according to BBC. "I have been working on speech technology for 25 years," Cohen told the BBC. "There have been steady improvements and this is the culmination of lots of work over years and years. We have had to work on a wide variety of problems like accent variation, background noise, the variation in language, in pronunciation."
BBC reports that YouTube, owned by Google, is the Web's most popular video site. Its users upload about 28,800 hours of video each day.
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