YouTube closed captioning on video in English

YouTube has activated a few hours a new feature that allows you to captioning all the videos posted by its users. In reality this is not a novelty in that the closed captioning on video in English has been reserved since last November (the date of their launch) to a small circle of partners.


Google continues to use its proprietary technology of speech recognition, used in particular for Google Voice Search, or for the phone with simultaneous translator. The company in Mountain View took advantage of the spread of this function to its large audience of members by specifying the mode of operation of the new service. The captioning is at present restricted to videos in English, but Google promises to gives other tongues “in the coming months.”

The technology will not work with intelligible conversations, as revealed by the press release. Google admits however that the result is often flawed and wrong, but the authors of the video can easily correct the subtitles automatically generated and publish a proper video. Combined with the automatic translation feature, this service aims to improve the accessibility of content to all internet users around the world, including deaf people or people with some hearing problems.

Although the Mountain View company has declined to comment on this, closed captioning should enable Google to increase its popularity, not only by enlarging the target user but probably also by improving the indexing of his videos.