Back in November of last year Google announced that they would be starting to add automatic captions in Youtube with the help of the voice recognition algorithm that was already been tested and used in Google Voice.
Youtube began to roll out the feature on last Thursday on the video hosting portal and a new CC button is now shown on some videos there. This button contains controls to transcribe the audio of the video, translate captions, change captions display settings and select one of the available captions for playback.
Google mentioned back then that only selected partners would take part in the initial rollout of the automatic captions feature including several universities like Stanford, Yale, MIT or UC Berkeley, some media companies like Columbia or National Geographic and of course most official Google and Youtube channels.
Pressing the CC button on a Youtube video page will display an on screen menu with options to request automatic captions for that video. The technology currently only supports captions of English language videos with the likelihood that Google will add additional languages eventually.
It should also be noted that the captions button is only available on Youtube and not in the embedded player, at least not currently. A situation that might change in the future.
The quality of the captions varies highly depending on many factors including the quality of the video and the speaker. It can be totally off at times which might irritate users who cannot hear the audio or do not understand it.
Automatic Captions nevertheless is a very interesting new option for the hearing impaired, users from foreign countries who would like to better understand videos that are not offered in their language and everyone else who wants to see captions on Youtube.
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To achieve 100% accuracy, you’re better off using something like MovieCaptioner to create an SRT caption file to upload with your movie to get perfect captions. it’s very easy to do.