YouTube puts captions on millions of videos

Posted March 5, 2010 at 5:55 a.m.

Associated Press | YouTube is adding captions to millions of Internet videos. The feature expands upon speech-recognition technology that YouTube began using to make captions available on a limited number of videos late last year.

YouTube’s audience will be able to request captions at the press of a
button. Video producers will also be able to download the automated
captions and improve upon them.


For now, YouTube’s captioning tool will only work on videos with
English audio, although there are plans to include more languages. The
English audio, however, can be translated into 50 different languages.

YouTube, owned by Google, is the Web’s most popular video site. Its users upload about 28,800 hours of video each day.

 

One comment:

  1. C March 5, 2010 at 10:07 a.m.

    I saw one of these yesterday. I hope this in beta, because the captioning was full of errors. Speech recognition by humans includes the ability to know what words would make no logical sense in the context. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate captions, but they have to be an improvement over just listening.