YouTube To Machine-Caption Videos

Netflix is working on making captions for streaming titles available sometime next year through SAMI, but YouTube today announced that they will be using machine-generated captions. 

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

Thanks to Seth and Davis for this story.

Comments

[Seth]

oh here we go again...can't wait to hear the deaf people complain more

[Seth]

This is a different Seth saying:

- I'm sure you complain when the audio is out of sync on instant view movies, correct?

- Or when a movie's volume is not loud enough in a theater? Or people are talking and you can't hear the dialogue?

Why shouldn't they complain that they can't watch instant movies?

[Andy]

My daughter is mostly deaf and her first question when I showed her instant watch was how to add the captions. What Google has done to add text to video that has never been professionally subtitled just shows how little Netflix is doing with video that has been subtitled for them.

[Seth]

In addition, this is becoming a competitive issue for Netflix. Hulu has CC on many programs. Now YouTube is moving forward.

It's only a matter of time before Congress amends the the Television Decoder Circuity Act and Telecommunications Act of 1996 to include internet viewing platforms. It's an easy call.

The choice of Silverlight and Reed's presence's on Microsoft's board can't be helping. Microsoft is way behind the curve on this with SAMI. What is Reed going to say? "Yeah, we know, Silverlight blows for CC."

Netflix is in a bad spot with this.