submitted by Catharine

Google has yet again, impressed us with their developments. You guys rock, really. I love your mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s so simple yet it packs a lot. It gave me great joy to sit among representatives from national Deaf and Hard of Hearing organizations at Google’s announcement of machine-generated captions from the Washington, D.C. office. Ever since I received the invitation by e-mail a week prior to the event, with the subject line: “Google Announcement: Auto-generated captions in YouTube” I kept wondering what it could possibly mean. This is a tidbit of the dialogue in my head that whole week:

“Auto-generated captions in YouTube? What could that possibly mean? Real-time captioning? No way. That would be too good to be true. We’re a long, long way from that.”

Boy, was I wrong! I nearly jumped out of my seat when Ken Harrenstein, the software engineer behind this project, announced that he and his team are making it easier for YouTube Channel Owners (e.g., people who post videos on YouTube) to provide captions on their content with automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. It became immediately apparent that only a handful of the millions of videos posted on YouTube are provided with captions. The launch of YouTube captions in 2008 required significant work by the Channel Owner. For example, at Keen Guides, in order to get captions on our videos, we’ve had to a.) upload the text file, and b.) listen to the video, and match up the time-codes with the text to assign each caption. This process easily took me an hour for a 2-minute video.

The two new advancements that Google announced are: 1.) automatic timing, and 2.) automatic captioning. Today, automatic timing is available to everyone. I’m excited about automatic timing, because the step of b.) listening to video, and matching up the time-codes is virtually eliminated for me. Yes!! Here’s an excellent video overview about the new developments. I encourage you to view it if you have 2.5 minutes:  Automatic Captions in YouTube demo

Also, I wanted to mention, that the captions on YouTube also come with a translation feature using Google Translator. I hear it’s quite accurate, really. This is big for us because we’re all about creating accessible experiences for everyone, including people who speak foreign languages. When you view a video with English captions, as a viewer,  you can have those same captions transcribed to one of the 51 languages. AWESOME. Now you can tell the world about what’s so special about the giant 5-ton rubber band ball. (Oh, how I’d love to see that bounce), but on a more serious note, from venues on the National Mall, like our video on the Lincoln Memorial. (If you click on the bottom right corner, you can turn on the captions, and then have them translated to French or any other language!)

I better go – I have quite a handful of text files to upload to my Google Videos to get captioned!