UPDATE – March 10, 2010: Yes, it is true. Google has announced that the “automatic captioning service” first detailed in November, is now available to all accounts (channels). It appears that, for now, you have to “request” the service (although it appears they automatically had captioned my latest video which was posted several months ago), and they will eventually get to all of them. Pretty cool. More on the announcement. Directions on how to caption
I recently heard the news about the new “automatic captioning” that Google is providing to certain YouTube accounts. According to the “Official Google Blog:”
…we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.
Apparently, Google is rolling this out with a select group of partners and on specific channels. My understanding is that Google will simply start captioning videos in these groups using this new automatic system.
Anyone who knows anything about captioning knows that automatic systems are fraught with problems. It seems the best captioners are still human beings. And, well, I’m guessing Google is not interesting in hiring half the population of the planet and training them to become transcriptionists. Cause that’s what it would probably take to get enough human power to deal with the zillions of YouTube videos out there.
But if you can’t wait for Google to automatically caption the home videos of your kids opening their Christmas presents, you can use another, lesser-known, and equally free service called CaptionTube. It is not clear from my reading if CaptionTube is a service that Google Labs developed themselves or whether is was acquired through some kind of company merger, but in any case, the price is right. I’m still playing with it so I don’t have an official opinion yet. If you are a master user, send me a comment or an e-mail.
I have, for a year or so, been also playing around with an application called MovCaptioner that runs on the Mac OSX. SynchriMedia, the maker of MovCaptioner has been promising a Windows version, but I’m thinking CaptionTube might be the right product at the right price. MovCaptioner costs $39.95 for one license which provides free updates. Multiuser licenses are also available for a discount.
Both MovCaptioner and CaptionTube work essentially the same way. You load your video (in the case of CaptionTube, you can work off an existing YouTube video that has already been published). As you play back your video in the application, you can stop (marking the time code automatically) and type in what the people on the video are saying. It is not really easy to do, so I have developed an new affinity for the people who do this work professionally. People do not talk in nice tight sound bytes, so you will quickly find it is hard to “stop the tape” at the appropriate spot and add the caption. You also have to have pretty good listening skills. You will end up often repeating the clip to get the wording correctly. Again, it’s not easy.
After you have created the text for your captions, you click some buttons, uploading the caption file, and check back in a little while and see your YouTube with captions. In the case of MovCaptioner, you have a number of options for saving and publishing your video. MovCaptioner has the advantage of saving a file that can use it with, or converted for use with any media player, not just the Flash media player that YouTube uses.
Both captioning systems appear to use an “closed caption” method meaning the caption transcript is kept separate from the video file (not embedded like subtitles in old movies). It can be turned off and on by the user, and the transcript itself can be saved and used separately – with or without the time codes. This is a nice option.
I’ve made this all sound very simple; it’s not. But, it is not all that difficult either. Like anything, it is an acquired skill.
I am hoping this new automatic service from Google takes off and become universally available soon. At the very least, Google could first provide this as a service for folks who need to get their videos captioned now (e.g., educational institutions, governments, etc.). Maybe even open it up with invites like they did with GMail and GoogleWave. I’d be happy to be a beta tester.
Anyway, a solution to finding a quick and inexpensive way of captioning short videos is coming closer to fruition. Exciting times. Stay tuned!
No related posts.
I’m curious, did you read about the other part of the Google/Youtube captioning announcement? It’s not all about automatic captions.
The second major part of that announcement was a very powerful set of captioning tools that will make captioning much easier. For example, you can upload the script of the video, and Google will automatically sync the captions to the audio. (Using speech analysis with a script is much more precise than without). Or, you can go ahead and let Google do it’s best guess at writing the captions itself, and then go in and fix errors – obviously, both of these are preferable to the current situation.
It’s really really exciting. I honestly didn’t expect that the captioning problem would ever get a satisfactory solution, so seeing Google announce these free tools is just amazing. I expect that we will very soon see much larger percantages of videos with captions than ever before, and with better captions than ever before.
Yes, it is all very exciting. I’ve been trying to find some YT vids that have had the captioning created automatically using any of the methods, but no luck yet.