Youtube Adds Automatic Caption For Deaf Audience

In a move that could help deaf users of the internet community to enjoy watching videos on the world’s most popular video sharing site YouTube, its parent company Google has announced that it would soon begin to roll out an automatic caption across the website.

Although the captioning feature isn’t new for the website as Google had apparently introduced manual user-generated captioning around three years back, but this time the tech giant would apparently make use of its Google Voice technology to upload videos with electronically generated captions.

Initially, these automatic captions will be available in English only, and they’ll only be available with the company’s 13 partner channels, including Columbia and National Geographic, but gradually it is expected to be accessible in any of the 51 languages.

The software engineer behind this extremely useful technology, Ken Harrenstien, who is deaf, has hailed the new feature for helping hearing-impaired, and citing the same, he quoted in a blog post: "The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me".

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However, the translation technology still reportedly caries some flaws, but it "will continue to improve with time", Harrenstien added.

In addition to these automatic captions, Google has further taken the hassles out of manual captioning by launching an ‘auto-timing’ tool, which just requires users to create a text file containing all the words used in the video and Google’s ASR would subsequently convert those words into on-screen captions.