Video captions are useful not only for the hearing impaired and the deaf but also for video owners as well as it improves search findability of videos and machine translation. The thing is adding caption to videos before uploading them can be a pretty dauting task. Â The YouTube folks know this, and so they just rolled out two useful features – automatic caption or auto-caps and auto-timing.
Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice for automatically generating video captions. The captions are no where near perfection but since this is a new feature, it is bound to improve in time – hopefully.
Auto-caps is currently visible only on some of YouTube’s partner channels including – UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke,UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google &YouTube channels.
Auto-timing on the other hand, which is now available to English language videos on YouTube  lets you add automatic captions manually. What’s good about this feature is that it makes the task of adding captions to videos easier. All you need to do is to create a text file with all the words in the video and YouTube will use Google’s ASR tecnology to identify which part the video the words were spoken – then create the appropriate captions.
Originally posted on November 19, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
thanks for share!