Updated Nov. 23, 2009 at 8:50 a.m.

Google goes closed captioning, adding captions to YouTube videos

Print this blog post

Get the latest news alerts: Follow LTW at Twitter.

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Think of it as closed captioning for the new media world.
Google Inc. is beginning to add automatic, machine-generated captions for videos on its YouTube site. The new service is intended to make online videos accessible to the deaf and hearing-impaired.

Hundreds of thousands of videos on Google sites already contain caption tracks that users have created and added manually with Google's existing captioning service. But with 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, most videos on the site still lack captions.

So Google is tapping into the speech-recognition technology that it uses for its Google Voice call management service to make captions an automatic feature on YouTube.

 

Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Editor’s Blog

Editor’s Blog

The latest blog posts from our Local Tech Wire and WRAL editors. Read more articles…

Featured