A great endcap to our great presentation yesterday by Stephani Roberts from MIT’s ATIC and CJ Johnson from 3Play Media, the New York times published this article yesterday about new features coming to YouTube.
Google will begin rolling out service the end of this week that will automatically generate text captions to many videos on its site!
YouTube has supported closed captioning on the site already, but this new service will allow users to upload a video, the closed captioning will be automatically generated, and allow the owner to review accuracy of the closed captioning before the content is published.
The service will be piloted on a limited number channels at first, including channels from Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Google itself, and our very own MIT! Google hopes to gradually expand that number.
If you’re interested in closed captioning your own video, Google also rolled out another service that allows anyone who uploads a video to YouTube the option of uploading a text file of the words spoken in the video. This service then “auto-synchs” the text file and the video, turning the text file into captions and automatically matching the spoken words with the files.
This edited post was first published on the MIT WebPub blog on November 20, 2009.