YouTube To Provide Captions For Videos

Google's YouTube said it will offer automatically generated captions for its entire video catalog, a boon for deaf users and those who want to watch videos in other languages.

At a press conference at YouTube's San Bruno (CA) headquarters, Google software engineer Ken Harrenstein demonstrated the feature and went through the reasons Google invested in the product—from expanding accessibility to crossing language barriers to improving search. For instance, YouTube watchers can select to see captions in a different language from the language of the video. Harrenstein, who is deaf and gave his presentation in sign language, said he has been working on the product for five years. YouTube has been pushing captions for a while, and hundreds of thousands of videos have them. In 2008, it began allowing content owners to upload their own captions. Last year, Google turned on automatic captioning for videos uploaded by a small number of partners, like the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University. Now, YouTube is rolling them out across the catalog of millions of videos, as long as the video has clear audio. The move was cheered by several students at the California School of the Deaf, who were in attendance.