Closed Captioning on Youtube

Just last week, Youtube announced it will begin offering widespread automatic captioning on videos hosted there. It works similarly to the way your phone recognizes voice commands -- speech recognition technology translates the spoken word into text. In the case of the videos, the text will then appear on the lower part of the video. You can toggle it on or off by clicking on the arrow on the lower right-hand corner to bring up an icon that says "CC," for "closed captioning."

This means greater accessibility for the millions of hearing impaired, of course, but the benefits will likely not stop there. Because narration will now be in text format, that means it's searchable, opening up wider opportunities for getting your video found by search engines. No official word, though, on whether that's being done at this point, but it makes a lot of sense. Another potential benefit: Once the captions have been created, they could also be automatically translated into other languages.

How well does it work? Well...let's just say it's a work in progress. Youtube concedes as much:

Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day.

Here's a sample of Youtube's automatic captioning on a real estate listing video created by Spartina Studios and narrated by a professional voiceover talent:

Note the errors in the automatic captions -- it seems about 75% accurate. Now check out this video, also produced by Spartina Studios, that includes a custom caption file:

This caption, created by hand and not automatically, is 100% accurate.

Bottom line? The autocaptioning may not be perfect, but it's a great first step in making videos more accessible to a wider audience.