YouTube Adds Auto Captioning

Last week on the YouTube blog it was announced that auto captioning will be added to videos uploaded to YouTube.  Ostensibly this is to support improved accessibility to video content for the visually impaired, however, the potentially immense time (and cost) savings possible by applying this technology will be immediately obvious to anyone involved in Digital Asset Management, preservation or video logging (transcription in particular):

Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages — all in just a couple of clicks.

The key question of course is how well it works.  With that in mind, readers may want to note some of the comments on the blog entry – especially with reference to accents!

Despite the technical challenges, as reported last week in our review of Bueda there is clearly a lot of work being done on automated cataloguing and it may only be a question of time before some of these technologies are reliable and cost effective enough to be used for real-world DAM systems.

Read the full entry on the You Tube blog.

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