YouTube translates audio into captions automatically

Description:

No one can deny that YouTube has an impressive following. Still, Google knows that the video website hasn’t been able to serve all those who may visit it including the hearing impaired. The company took a step toward addressing this shortcoming when it launched automatic captions to a small group back in November.

As the name implies, automatic captions uses speech technology to determine the appropriate captioning for a video. With 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute it would be nearly impossible to manually transcribe all of them. Luckily, Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology means someone won’t have to. This is the same technology Google uses in Google Voice Search.

Now even with the best speech recognition technology there can be errors. Even more so if the audio track is not clear. That’s why content providers will be able to download the automatic captions, improve them and upload the changes. Viewers also have some cool capabilities as well. The captions can be translated into one of fifty languages giving videos a new global audience.

Currently, the auto-caption process is limited to English-speaking videos and clear audio tracks. YouTube hopes to process all of the English-speaking videos in its catalog, but video owners can request for their video to be processed quicker by clicking on the “request processing” button.