Saturday, December 1, 2012

YouTube Captioning

YouTube is expanding its automatic video captioning by adding six more languages. German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch are now part of the company's automatic-captioning services. YouTube engineer Hoang Nguyen writes:
"Captions are important to make sure everyone—including deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages—can enjoy videos on YouTube. In 2009, you first saw a feature that automatically creates captions on YouTube videos in English, and since then, we've added Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Today, hundreds of millions of people speaking six more languages—German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch—will have automatic-caption support for YouTube videos in those languages."
Just click the red closed-caption button (CC) that you find on the task bar of a YouTube video and pick which language you want to use. The service is not perfect, but is improving.  More than 200 million YouTube videos have automatic or human-created captions.