20/11/2009 - Automatic Captions in YouTube
Google have announced the development of machine-generated automatic captions in Google Video and YouTube.
Google have combined their automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the current 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, but they can still be helpful and the technology will continue to improve with time.
In addition to the auto-caps, Google are also launching automatic caption timing to make it easier to create captions manually. Thanks to the auto-timing, users no longer need to have special expertise to create their own captions in YouTube. All that is required is the loading of a text file transcript, and Google's ASR technology will figure out when the words are spoken and will create the captions for you. This will hopefully lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but don't have the time or resources to create professional captioned tracks.
For the intial launch, the auto-caps system will only be available for a handful of partners intially, with rollout to all YouTube users in the future. The auto-timing system, however, will be available globally for all English-language videos on YouTube.
Further information from the Official Google Blog
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