YouTube brings automatic captioning for videos

YouTube on Thursday said it has began development on a feature that will allow hearing-impaired visitors to get the full benefit of its video-hosting site. In its latest efforts to bring captions to videos, YouTube will offer automatic captions to all YouTube users. The hosting site cautions it will take a long time to offer captions on all of the videos it hosts, but promises to allow visitors to request processing to speed up the caption-creation process for their videos.

Currently, only videos with English, clearly-spoken and noise-free audio will be captioned. Also, the auto-captions may not always be accurate, but YouTube says its software is being continually improved.

Finally, users will need to enable the auto-captioning process for their videos. One commenter on YouTube's announcement who used the feature said about 75 percent of words are picked up by the software, but does admit the video may not have included perfect audio, and does allow for self-editing.

By Electronista Staff