Google adds Auto Captioning to YouTube…..

Wow…..Another amazing feature brought to you just in time for X-Mas by the google…..Auto Captioning or Auto-Cap. You might be wondering Caption-Schmaption…..Why? Well first on the list would be accessibility which is self explanatory, but also searchability and auto-translation. You see once a video has been captioned, google can provide searchability, you can do word searches and literally jump to the point in video where the word is mentioned…..That’s really cool. Auto-translation is another natural fit, once you’ve got the english captions, you can do machine translation to any of the other 51 languages google translation engine supports.

To achieve this google combined their automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions. Auto-caps uses the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

In addition to automatic captions, google is also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and google will use their ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.

For now, auto-caps is only visible on a handful of partner channels (UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia,PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google & YouTube channels.) Auto-timing, on the other hand, is rolling out globally for all English-language videos on YouTube.

THANKS GOOGLE :-)