YouTube Makes Captioning Available To All 102
adeelarshad82 writes "Google's YouTube announced that it has moved its automatic speech-recognition and closed-captioning technology out of beta and has now made it available to the YouTube community at large. Most, if not all, YouTube videos now include a 'CC' button that, if pressed, will automatically generate the closed-captioning technology. The technology processes the audio feed using the speech-recognition technology used in the core voice search feature that has also been built into the Android voice search feature, the GOOG-411 phone search, and other products."
Not only that (Score:1, Interesting)
They also changed the way videos are sent to the browser, many flash video players are failing because of that.
Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of the words hello and bye were dark, the rest were mostly light gray.
What, one may wonder, was the actual message? Well, it appeared to be someone trying to fax something - although, the tones didn't sound quite like FAX negotiation tones, but surely no one would be mis-dialing a modem number in this day and age.
I was intrigued by the limited vocabulary it produced here. Almost as if the most common words are these greeting words (hello, hey, hi) and sign off words (bye) and these words are so preferred that line noise ends up just being these top few words.
Wish commercial TV stations would use this tech! (Score:2, Interesting)
Wish this technology would be used by TV stations to provide 'sort of' subtitling for programs that don't have any. This could be helpful for deaf/hearing impaired viewers.
Where I live (Netherlands), there's a few public TV channels. Most programs on there are subtitled using a dedicated teletext page (888). For the bulk of commercial channels, there's also subtitles for things like prime time movies, and specific (popular) TV shows. But a lot of it is not, like average day time shows / late night documentaries / commercials etc. etc. This is due to manpower/cost issues: you have a limited audience, a limited percentage of viewers that is deaf/hearing impaired, and (proper) subtitling needs humans. Read money = eating into commercial TV stations' bottom line. It's entirely up to these stations to decide what to subtitle, and what not.
This technology (combined with automated translation) would be a nice complement for those programmes where human-provided subtitling is deemed to expensive. Automated translation is still bad at times, but for deaf/hearing impaired people, subtitles with a bad translation can still be better than no subtitles at all. An automated system shouldn't be very expensive when applied to mass media like national TV, and would be easy to provide for all programmes. And perhaps speech recognition / automated translation would improve over time, to the point where humans aren't needed anymore to get good results.
Re:Noteable, but still very much experimental (Score:5, Interesting)
This, if they allow for corrections it could be an incredibly huge resource of data for google. They'd end up with people spending millions of man hours teaching google how to do voice recognition. And having highly accurate voice recognition would be a boon for society generally.
Re:As long as they don't use GVoice Tech. (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn’t that essentially what modem negotiation actually is? The two modems talking to each other, saying “hello” at length?
My goodness. It’s alive, and it can understand V.34...
Now easier to catch unwanted content (Score:2, Interesting)
Soon (now?) they can generate captions of everything heard (or sung) in a video immediately after upload and match the captions against lyrics and transcriptions of copyrighted works or even just search them for specific keywords. Then they can flag those videos as possible copyright violations or even prevent them from being displayed until after being reviewed by someone.
I'm not saying captioning isn't a good idea, only that it can be used for more than just assisting the hard of hearing.