For those of you that are a little hard of hearing or have no sound card, Youtube have done the decent thing and launched auto captioning on all new English language videos using the Google automated speech-recognition software. This means we can all read instead of listen if we wish.

Figures show that by the year 2015 there may be around 700 million people who have hearing difficulties, and as video is becoming more and more widespread especially via the top video site on Earth – Its good to see Google taking a stand for all hard of hearing people. The translation technology from Google also allows the captions to be translated into most languages of the world.

Google stated:- Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.

Considering that more than 20 hours of video are now being uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day. how they will keep up with it all is beyond me. For videos that have captioning enabled there is a cc symbol beneath the video playing. Users just have to click the link to get captions working.

The system is still in beta mode and Google say that its speech-recognition algorithms are not perfect, and on listening/reading a selection of videos i noticed many errors. For instance the announcer saying “extra points” became “exploits” amongst many others, and this from a very well spoken person. Note to self, dont make videos with a slurry voice, there will be hell to pay.

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