Folium: YouTube’s Automatic Captioning Adds Six Additional Languages via Engadget

Posted by LEAF Architect on Friday, December 7, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Folium: YouTube’s Automatic Captioning Adds Six Additional Languages via Engadget

I envy the Google engineers. From what I understand, they are often given time to work on their own projects, or improve existing projects using original ideas.

I’ve gotta believe that YouTube’s automatic captioning is one of those side projects that took a life of its own and became something incredible.

I’m far from qualified to write about the state of technological accessibility, but think about how much we rely on YouTube for all sorts of day to day reasons. And now imagine not being able to utilize half of the media experience that is being offered.

YouTube isn’t manually captioning each video, their servers are listening to the audio and are transcribing it all electronically! (Sometimes with hilarious results…)

Now in 10 languages, automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute. As automatic captions will have some errors, creators also have several tools to improve the quality of their captions. Automatic captions can be a starting point, where creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. Creators can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronized captions. (YouTube Blog)

OPPA GANGNAM STYLE!

Now everyone can ponder the deep philosophical message of “Gangnam Style” in their own language!

Now, there’s another side to this. Sometimes, YouTube’s servers get it wrong… very wrong… often with hilarious results. Check this out…

Huffington Post: YouTube Captioning Fail

I honestly applaud YouTube’s innovation, in an age where media companies are not required to offer such services, they’ve gone ahead and made it the world standard! Companies like Netflix, Apple (iTunes), and other media organizations are just beginning to understand the power of having captioning available to everyone, regardless of language.

Have you ever tried to utilize technology without using one of your senses?

Could you imagine the most popular viral videos on the internet without sound or text? How would that change the impact of the video?