Google announces automatic caption technology in YouTube content

[kdpeters]

Google announces new features that make it easier for content providers to offer video accessible to the Deaf and hard of hearing through captions. Help spread the word to make online content more accessible to Deaf and hard of hearing people.

I've posted the accompanying video demo to the political forums video. Be sure to watch it too. It is fully captioned: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x404217

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http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html

Automatic captions in YouTube
11/19/2009 08:30:00 AM
Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Today, I'm in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions.

Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.

However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use 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.

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1. Will it use the same technology that resulted in

"A wrong accusation may cost Bill Jones one million dollars"

being captured as

"A long cushion may cost Bill Jones one million dollars"

or "Ari Fleischer"

being captured as

"Airy Flasher"

or a Miss America contestant saying,

"Public schools have fewer books than private schools"

being shown on screen as

"Public schools have fewer boobs than private schools"?

All of which I have seen happen.