Google Rolls Out Captioning

Google is moving its automatic speech-recognition and closed-captioning technology out of beta on YouTube to make it available for all video's that are posted. The software will automatically generated captions for its entire video catalog. This also means YouTube watchers can choose to see captions in a different language from the language of the video. Ken Harrenstein who heads up the project is deaf and gave his presentation in sign language at Google's headquarters today. He has been working on the project for five years. Google turned on automatic captioning last year for a small number of partners for testing. Harrenstein pointed out that the technology still isn't perfect. Since 24 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Google did not have a timetable at to when all of the videos would be captioned, but executives said it will be very soon.