Google has more or less gotten voice-recognition technology down, as evidenced by the feature’s popularity in Google Voice. Now it’s planning to roll out the technology onto YouTube — that means YouTube videos will be automatically captioned, for the benefit of hard-of-hearing users (and those who somehow still have problems with their sound cards, maybe).
Well, that’s the plan, anyway. Since the speech-recognition feature is still a work in progress, Google is only implementing it in a few partner companies’ YouTube channels. But Google hopes to implement the feature in such a way that anyone who needs it can get it.
For now, the rest of us can enjoy a new “auto-timing” feature from Google. Now video creators can create text files with the words spoken in their videos, and the speech-recognition technology will match the text to the words spoken. This should make captioning videos much easier.
The automatic captioning should be worth seeing, though. I have a feeling that, with Google’s AdSense sometimes mismatching line ads with web page content, there’ll be quite a few incorrect captions to see in the near future, but this technology will only improve with time.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }