AutomaticCaptions
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YouTube's automatic captions service adds six additional languages
Building upon the work Google began in 2009, YouTube is now extending its automatic captioning reach to six additional languages. Previously, the transcription service was only available to speakers of English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish, but as of today, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch have also been added to the fold. Auto-caps, as the company calls it, works by employing the same voice recognition algorithms used within Google Voice, but as anyone familiar with that speech software can attest, it's not always error-free. So, expect some things to be (unintentionally and somewhat amusingly) lost in translation. Speaking of which, with the site's recent inclusion of the search giant's translation software, users will also have the option take their captioned vids and make them readable across a variety of languages. YouTube: building linguistic bridges across the internet's borders.
YouTube brings human-enabled closed captioning to live video for Google I/O
If you were glued to your computer during the live broadcast of the Google I/O keynote yesterday morning, you might have noticed a new feature accompanying an otherwise recognizable YouTube video. The online video provider used this morning's conference kickoff as the springboard for its live captioning feature, which brings human input to the transcription process. According to Google's Naomi Black, a team of stenographers banged out translations during this morning's keynote. The resulting captions were then displayed on the conference floor and delivered by an "open source gadget" to the I/O YouTube channel. This new feature apparently prevents the inaccuracies experienced using Google's automatic captioning function, which, if you'll recall, provided us with at least a couple hearty chuckles when we took it for a spin. The code behind the new live captions will be available to YouTube's partners and competitors on Google Code. You can check out tomorrow's keynote to see how the humans fare.
