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November 30, 2009
YouTube videos will soon get captions
 (Article by Hiawatha Bray, November 20, 2009)
 
Soon you'll be able to understand thousands of Internet videos even if the sound is turned down. With an assist from Boston public TV station WGBH, Google Inc. has developed technology that will automatically add on-screen captions to video streams on its popular YouTube website.

Ken Harrenstien, Google's lead software engineer on the project, said the new technology will make many YouTube videos accessible to hearing-impaired people for the first time. "Many people have wanted this to happen for many years,'' said Harrenstien, who is deaf.

Harrenstien said the captioning service would be made available
"sometime this week.'' It uses speech recognition software that
translates spoken words into written text. Google already uses this technology in Google Voice, the company's new telephone service. GoogleVoice subscribers can read their voice mails, which are translated into text and displayed on a Web page.
 
The YouTube captioning system uses the same technology to "listen'' to the soundtrack of a video, translate the voices to text, and display the text as subtitles as the video plays. In addition, the text can be fed through Google's language translation software, so the subtitles can be read in 51 languages.

The caption system will be introduced as a beta test, an in-progress version that represents Google's admission that all the bugs haven't yet been worked out. "Speech recognition is a long way from perfect,'' said Harrenstien.

At first, the captions will only be available on videos produced by a number of major publications, including National Geographic, and major universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Google hopes to add instant captions to virtually all YouTube video content as the technology improves. Google vice president Vint Cerf said the company must also find out whether it needs the creator's permission to generate a transcript of a video. "We have to be a little careful about doing all this automatically, because we don't own the rights,'' Cerf said.

Automatic transcription could make video information more accessible to everybody, not just the hearing-impaired. The text file generated by the system could be added to the Google search engine, making it easier to look up videos on any topic. "If there is specific oral content of interest,'' said Cerf, "we can find it.''

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at  www.bray@globe.com. 




 



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