Today Youtube rolled out a new feature: automatic captioning! Youtube is using Google’s speech-recognition technology to automatically transcribe what I’m saying and display it as a closed caption in the bottom third of the screen. Best of all, you can translate what I’m saying into virtually any language!
So how does this work? In the bottom right-hand side of the player there is a button with an “up” arrow (make sure you’ve started playing the video). If you hover over it with your mouse some additional options will pop up. One of these options reads “cc” with an arrow next to it. Hover over the arrow and a “transcribe audio” option will appear. Once you’ve transcribed the audio, you can repeat the process to translate what I’m saying into another language.
Google’s speech-recognition technology does an OK job of translating what I’m saying. Some words are way off… but maybe I’m not enunciating properly =)
You can try this new feature out on the video below –
