YouTube’s Auto Captioning

The worldʼs largest video sharing site, YouTube, has launched another new feature, which may be especially useful for the millions of users who browse through the videos that are not in their native languages, as well as for those with hearing impediments.

Subtitles are widely used in the media sector to facilitate and enhance understanding of visual contents, but it is not so easy to caption videos, word by word. Now, however, YouTube has introduced its solution: Auto Caption.
It is not surprising as Google has already launched Google Voice, which uses its distinct ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) technology and voice-to-word algorithms to convert voice messages into text. Itʼs like transforming voice messages into emails.

Currently, this Auto Captioning feature is available on Googleʼs corporate videos and those pertinent to academia. YouTube, which has cited is goal of allowing everyone convenient access to all shared videos, says it will expand the implementation of this feature to videos in more subjects.
On a similar note, YouTube has also launched a secondary feature, Auto Timing. Until now, users had to type subtitles, stop and play the video repetitively to record minutes and seconds, time code them, and hope that the text and video would synchronize as perfectly as possible. But, with YouTubeʼs Auto Timing, users can simply type the subtitles in .txt format and upload. YouTube will take care of the rest by synchronizing the text and video precisely using its Auto Captioning technology.
YouTube proclaims that both of these features function smoothly on anglophone videos, but it does also state that the technology work – to a certain extent – quite well with several foreign languages. As they say: some work, some donʼt, but itʼs better than nothing.

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