Andre Yoskowitz
21 Nov 2009 19:48
Google has announced that they have begun adding automatic captions to videos available via YouTube, giving deaf viewers a much needed service.
Ken Harrenstien, a deaf software engineer who works for Google, is the man behind the machine-generated captions, although they will only appear on 13 channels at launch.
"The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me," Harrenstien said via the official Google Blog.
Harrenstien says the system, which combines automatic speech recognition with YouTube's current caption system, is not perfect, but that it will "continue to improve with time".
Additionally, users can upload a transcript of their video and Google auto-timing algorithms will match the text to the words on screen as they are spoken.