There’s some cool changes over at YouTube, folks, and it makes the world of online video even more accessible to the masses. Accessibility is everything!
An automatic captioning/subtitling feature, once only available to a few educational partners, will soon be available to YouTube’s general audience. Choose “transcribe audio” from the captioning menu of any video and you’ll be able to use Google’s speech recognition software to place captions or subtitles at the bottom of the screen so that viewers who are hearing impaired can follow along.
You can also choose to translate the captions into foreign languages. The software’s not perfect, but it’s come along way from the early days of voice-to-text.
Google now has auto-timing, which makes it easier to create a simple text file of the words within a video; add that with Google’s technology to match up the words with the video and you’re cookin’.
It seems this combo of features will greatly improve indexing when search algorithms and spider bots starting combing through the text.