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Auto-Captioning Live on YouTube

A few months ago, YouTube announced they would begin supporting closed captions on videos.  Since that time, we here at iePlexus have been using the feature on all of our social media news briefs, and have even been praised for our use of closed captioning. 

However, now YouTubers now have a feature which should make enabling closed captioning easier.  It’s known as YouTube auto-captioning. YouTube says auto-captions will help YouTube users reach a larger audience in a simple matter. 

After you upload your video, you’ll have to enable the feature.  You’ll only be able to auto-caption your own videos, and not others.  And depending on the length of your video, it could take several hours or even days to caption the entire video. 

I did a test on the auto-captioning feature with a short video I posted early this morning and to be frankly honest, the feature has a lot of work to be perfected.  It recognized about 10% of my words, and the rest were other were that could be semi-mistaken for another word or just random words, which I have no idea how they sounded similar.  

I had said, “I just have to say…” and YouTube transcribed that as, “On taxes it’s chaos.” How the two are related, I just don’t know, but the majority of the transcript is like that.

However, for the deaf community, this is one step closer to being able to enjoy web videos.  Students of the California School for the Deaf attended an information session this morning saying how they no longer feel excluded  from the sensation of web videos and are grateful to Google, who owns YouTube for building this technology.

One of those students included Joey Baer.  He had signed that he hopes that eventually there will be a sort of technology that is able to translate sign into text automatically.  And while that seems extremely complicated Google is in the beginning stages of that, which would be extraordinary.