Google Now Captioning Videos!Filed Under: Computers (General), Deafness

Or at the very least, the political ones! They’ve developed software that transliterates spoken speech into text for videos. The end result is captions on the videos, and also a side benefit is that now spoken words can be used as keywords for searching! Pretty cool! The internet just got a bit more accessible for the deaf! Here’s hoping Google will apply this to the rest of YouTube!

Here’s what Google said about the captioning in their own words:

Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

In addition to providing voters with election information, we also hope to find out more about how people use speech technology to search and consume videos, and to learn what works and what doesn’t, to help us improve our products.

The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube’s Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama’s and Senator McCain’s campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you’ll find the product useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn’t yet been completely solved, but we’re constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.

Here’s the direct link to Google’s blog post about this: Link

There’s four drawbacks to this though:

1. They only caption the parts of the video in where the keywords you searched for are mentioned,
2. The captions aren’t 100% accurate,
3. It’s in the form of a ‘Gadget’ that users can add to their iGoogle homepage, but isn’t applied anywhere else,
4. Only videos related to the current USA election & politics are currently transcribed.

In spite of those severe drawbacks, it’s great to see progress being made in automatic captioning of video media online! If developed to its fullest potential, this would be an enormous boon to the deaf everywhere!