YouTube Launches Live Captions

YouTube is launching captions for its live video feeds at Google I/O.

The new feature will be unveiled with the Google I/O live video stream, but it’s also going to be available to any YouTube Live partner, according to Google’s Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black. In fact, it could even be used by competing live streaming vendors to enhance their offerings. YouTube has been providing automatic captioning of its vast library of content since early last year, using the same type of voice recognition technology that’s also at work on any Android phone. However, automatic captioning isn't always accurate, and there’s no way for a publisher to correct automatically-generated captions in real time. That’s why the new YouTube Live captions feature relies on professional real-time captioning professionals instead of algorithms.