YouTube introduces automatic captions to videos
In a move that will make thousands more videos accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired, Google announced that videos on its YouTube site would sport machine-generated automatic captions.
Google has offered user-generated captioned videos for three years. What makes "auto-caps" different is that Google will now use the speech-recognition algorithms employed in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for all videos.
According to Google's blog, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The goal for auto-caps is to quickly get more videos captioned. Not only will the captions help deaf and hearing-impaired people to understand videos, but they will also assist people around the world to access video content, improve search and let viewers pinpoint exact sections of videos.
