To improve accessibility for the hearing impaired, YouTube on Thursday rolled out auto-captioning for all users. The video site initiated the project in 2008 and opened it up to a small group of users last November.
Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers will soon be able to choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages, explained YouTube Product Manager Hiroto Tokusei.
“Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015,” Tokusei said. “To address a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a time-consuming and complicated process.”
Technology Multitasking
YouTube is working to remove the barriers with auto-captions. If the video owner doesn’t initially choose to auto-generate the captions, YouTube is making it possible for viewers to request caption processing with a button next to uncaptioned videos. Any video owner can click the button if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions.
“This is of course a great thing for the deaf and hearing impaired. But it also illustrates how Google often uses its technology for multiple goals or products,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “Speech recognition was first rolled out in Goog 411. Over time that effort helped Google refine the product to do voice search and other voice functions on the iPhone and Android devices. This is yet another product of that same technology,…