Google Announces Automatic Captions on YouTube

ALDA-Sonora / Arizona - Founded 2009

The Association of Late-Deafened Adults

Arizona’s 1st Group

November 20, 2009

Google Announces Automatic Captions on YouTube

Every minute of every day, 20 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube. It’s hard to imagine so much uncaptioned video all in

one place.

On November 19, Google and YouTube launched an innovative software that will make more captioning available via YouTube.

Thanks to this new software, whenever a video is uploaded to YouTube, the video owner now has an option to easily add

captions. The software automatically creates time-coded captions for the text of the audio quickly, easily and for free. Those

captions add value to videos: videos with captions are searchable by text. That’s good not just for people with hearing loss, it’s

good for anyone who wants their video to be found on Internet.

Google has also found a way for viewers to get captions on videos already uploaded to YouTube. A viewer will be able to click on

a key that says “transcribe audio.” That command will add captions to videos they want to see when they want to see it. This

clever technique provides one answer to the question, how anyone possibly caption every video on YouTube? It’s all done by

machine. It uses voice recognition technology to automatically caption, or “auto-caption” the video.

Google and YouTube are in the “beta testing” phase with 13 educational partners. Because viewer-added captioning relies on

speech recognition technology, the captions are not yet perfect. In fact, Google admitted to a 20% error rate, far below the 2%

error rate we have come to expect from good caption writers on broadcast television. YouTube videos that have music or noise or

environmental sounds in the background will be even more problematic for accurate automatic captions.

Still, it’s a huge leap forward for captioning on the Internet. This is unprecedented because it’s been done without mandates, and

it’s free.

The passion of the Google team was evident at the event in Washington DC on November 13. Ken Harrenstien, the software

engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system and who is deaf, indicated the technology has never been applied

on such a large scale. “This is some thing that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said at the event.

Someday, we do hope to see voice recognition software create more accurate captions. When the next American Idol video goes

viral, we’d love to see the captioned version right from the start. In the meantime, the fact that Google and YouTube have put their

weight behind captioning is a terrific development. We expect to see more and more video creators and producers understanding

the value of searchable text captions that we can all enjoy.