Google is bringing its Google Voice speech recognition tech to YouTube, creating automatic captions for deaf and hearing-impaired users. Get ready for hilariously incorrect captions!
Because the speech-recognition technology is still a work in progress, Google is launching the automatic captioning service on the YouTube channels of just a handful of partners, including PBS, National Geographic and a few big universities. But the company promises that the technology will improve over time - and it hopes for a much broader rollout.
In the meantime, Google is adding a new "auto-timing" feature to its existing manual captioning service to make it easier to use. Video creators will now simply have to create a text file with all the words spoken in a video and Google's speech recognition technology will take it from there - matching the text to the words as they are spoken. Google hopes this will encourage more users to add captions to their videos.
[AP]