14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube is moving forward with its goal of close captioning all the videos on the site, not an easy task to say the least. Starting with last week, all the English-language videos on the site have been getting access to the auto-captioning technology Google has been testing and improving for a while now. It will be a while before all the videos get captions, but owners can request one for their videos to speed up the process. This is just the beginning, other languages are coming in future months.
"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," Hiroto Tokusei, product manager at YouTube, wrote.
"In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer," he explained.
"Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even be a 'request processing' button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions," he added.
For most people, this won't mean too much, but for the hearing-impaired, this opens up a huge library of content, which simply wasn't available to them before. There are plenty of business opportunities for Google as well, it's not an entirely altruistic move on its part, but this doesn't take away from the fact that it will improve the life of quite a lot of people, if only by a small bit.
The most obvious application of the technology, and the one Google is touting, is for the hearing-impaired and it's clear that opening up auto-captions will have a significant impact. But there's a secondary, yet perhaps even more important, aspect, in the grand scheme of things, better voice-recognition technology, a requirement for better captioning technologies, can be used to improve the lives of a lot more people, and bring Google quite a lot of money in the process.
Strictly related to videos, having the ability to 'translate' the contents of a video into words means that the video becomes instantly searchable by a conventional search technology like the one employed by Google and all other search engines. This means that the huge number of videos on YouTube will be a lot easier to 'understand' for computers, which, in turn, means much more relevant search results. A byproduct of this is the fact that it will make videos a lot more monetizable as well, something YouTube and all other user-generated video sites have struggled with for years.
For now, auto-captioning will be an option for all English-language videos. There are a few requirements, for example, the audio has to be pretty good for the technology to work, and a few caveats, the technology isn't perfect and errors are to be expected. But it is improving and it will be available for other languages soon enough so expect some interesting developments in the area in the next few years.
