Google Announces Closed Captioning on YouTube

Google announced this week that automatic closed captioning features will be added to YouTube. The captions will be machine generated and timed, not unlike dictation programs that deliver a transcript as a parallel medium.

What Google has done is combine their automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to enable the automatic captioning of video content. There will also be an auto-timing feature, which will provide the ability for users to manually create captions with a simple text file. While still very much in the beta phase, it can be expected that the software’s accuracy and execution will improve in future iterations.

From a Universal Design perspective, what this means is that YouTube videos should not only be more accessible but also more searchable. Whereas only the accompanying text for a YouTube video could be indexed previously, it will now be possible to index the actual content of the video. This is a significant improvement in the user experience; Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer at Google, points out other benefits:

Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.

Machine-generated captions will be available on thirteen channels, including National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels, and it is expected to be commonplace for colleges and university streams.