YouTube Auto-captions for Deaf

Teething problems - "sim card" becomes "salmon"

Google have announced on their blog that YouTube are to introduce automatic captions for deaf users.

The machine-generated captions, at first, will be in English and only found on 13 channels including National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels.

At the moment YouTube offers a manual captioning service but it generally sits unused.

The software engineer behind the technology, Ken Harrenstien, is deaf.

“The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me,” Mr Harrenstien wrote in the Google blog.

Combining automatic speech recognition with the current caption system, the translation is not foolproof (in a demonstration the phrase “sim card” becomes “salmon” in text), but Mr Harrenstien says that the technology “will continue to improve with time”.