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.
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