Archive for the ‘Voice Recognition’ Category
YouTube Rolls Out Site-wide Video Captioning
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010The previously announced auto-captioning beta on YouTube has finally gotten a site-wide roll out, but it’s still only available for English speaking countries. Although an extremely useful tool in theory, the results have been less-than-impressive for many users.
Voice recognition software has always gotten a bum rap from the beginning and no one has been able to get it quite right – though, not without a lack of trying. Even though Google’s technology is some of the best we’ve seen, it can’t escape the inevitable mistakes that plague voice recognition services. Engadget turned its critical eye on some of the more hilarious auto-captioning results:
Of course Google understands it’s not perfect and most users have come to expect a tolerable amount of error. YouTube offers the following caveats in their latest blog post:
- While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
- 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.
- Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
- Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.
For users and companies with a massive backlog of un-captioned video content, this tool is an invaluable head start in the race to make their content accessible to everyone. It’s far from a turnkey solution and requires users to manually submit their video for captioning, then perform a secondary quality check that can sometimes be daunting, and finally do a manual language conversion for non-English captions. However, given the alternative, YouTube has made everyone’s jobs a hell of a lot easier. Spending the time updating your video’s captions now could pay huge dividends down the road as Google starts properly indexing video content.
