YouTube Opens Automatic Captioning to Everyone

March 5, 2010 By Nick Mokey

Automatic captioning now available to all video uploaders will make transcribing audio for the deaf and hard of hearing nearly painless.

A man jumping into a ceiling fan. A robot falling down stairs. Cars on an icy street hitting each other like bumper cars. The best videos on YouTube don’t need captions. But for those that do, YouTube has expanded its automatic captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Although Google has been offering automatic captioning in conjunction with the speech-to-text engine from Google Voice Search since November, it was only available for select partners, leaving a majority of videos out in the cold. As of Thursday, the system will open to all users, allowing uploaders to have their videos processed and captions added automatically.

With 20 hours of video being upload every minute, plus millions of videos in the back catalog, YouTube says that not all videos will be captioned immediately. Uploaders can flag their videos for priority processing, and are encouraged to review the captioning afterward to tweak it for better accuracy.

As with all speech recognition – the results can get a little sketchy. Google cautions that it will never be perfect, it only works for English video at the time being, and that background noise or music can make it impossible to transcribe.

Showing 2 comments

Great Ping at 6:21pm 27th November 2010 Auto-caption does not work. TheGreatPing.com captioning does.
autoacumen at 3:06am 7th March 2010 With reference to Goggles speech recognition technology, It won’t be accurate, even the leading suppliers of this technology have failed to master the intricacy of peoples accents and background noises in video. Usually to get the accuracy that is required ends up requiring a lot of manual intervention.(Just ask the BBC ). However there is one company out there that seems to have mastered the trick of making it easy and free to enable videos to display subtitles which will be decoded from the video itself enabling in addition to the benefits of visual text provide by default complete accuracy in terms of video search .This Company is www.cambridge-iptv.com .

Cambridge-iptv’s free real time captioning (tagging) application makes the site's videos more accessible to the hearing-impaired, opening their video content up to an audience that for example includes Britain's nine million deaf or hearing-impaired people. Likewise it also empowers trainers or educators to produce from either existing or new material creative and educational video content. Users of the platform can also choose to translate into other languages. Please try out for yourself either on their web site:

Steve Anderson
CEO