Remember This Headline on the HLAA Website?
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November 20, 2009
Google Announces Automatic Captions on YouTube
Every minute of every day, 20 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube. It’s hard to imagine so much uncaptioned video all in one place.
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Back in November, 2009, Brenda Battat, executive director of Hearing Loss Association, and Lise Hamlin, director of public policy were invited to attend the official announcement by Google of the launching of innovative software that is rapidly making more captioning available via YouTube.
One way Google is making it easy to caption is to allow the owner to time code the script for the video automatically. A second way is using “automatic speech recognition” (ASR) technology to caption the video. Both of these techniques allow the ower to caption, quickly, easily and no small thing, for free. Back in November, Google was beta testing ASR captioning with 13 educational partners.
On March 4, Google announced it was opening up auto-captioning to all YouTube users. That means anyone who owns a video can use speech recognition software to caption it automatically when they post it to YouTube. Google told us their dream is to see thousands of videos on YouTube captioned, searchable by captions and available for translation of captions in other languages.
Now, Google does admit to a 20% error rate using ASR, far worse than the 2% error rate we have come to expect from professional caption writers on broadcast television. YouTube videos that have music or noise or environmental sounds in the background will be even more problematic for accurate automatic captions. Clearly, the owner of the video must correct the captions before the video is available for viewing. In our version of the captioning dream, not only would thousands of videos be captioned, they would be captioned 100% accurately.
Google has made it possible to clean up captions created with ASR. If the owner does not do that we can end up watching videos with lots of captioning mistakes. One website we found reported that during an award ceremony, Sandra Bullock’s acceptance speech had captions that read: “so I see tonight that workers and Florida have to work with a t-shirt.”
These captioning mistakes are making a splash on the Internet. On the one hand, it is too bad to see any bad captions going viral when we know how much good captioning is available. On the other hand the old canard, “there is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary” may be true in this case. The more people who see captions, good and bad, the more people who play with the captions on their own videos, the more people who will learn about them and talk about them, the greater the possibility that captioning will become ubiquitous. In the end, the optimist in me believes that we will see an increase in captions, and a decrease in errors as more and more captions are available on line. I believe captions will be alive and well on YouTube for a very long time to come.
Looking for more information about YouTube and captions? Visit http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about
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Did You See This Blog?
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Subtitles Now Available for Some Titles for PC/Mac Viewing
This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix. As I promised last year, I'm pleased to report that today we have enabled closed captioning for some TV episodes and movies that you can watch instantly on your PC or Mac. Although it's a limited library of content with subtitles available - about 100 titles - we now have released the technology and we will be working to fill in the library over time.
We have similar technology working in the lab for some of our game console, Blu-ray, and DTV platforms, which will roll out in releases starting this fall, along with support for 5.1 audio.
It's a start, with much more to come. You can try it for yourself with most episodes of "Lost" Seasons 1-4.
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http://blog.netflix.com/2010/04/subtitles-now-available-for-some-titles.html
OK, so maybe Netflix has just a little less ambition than Google. Google already is cranking out captioned videos by the dozens and dreams of making thousands of videos available with searchable captions in multiple languages around the world. That's a dream to believe in!
Still, there was a time that it looked like Netflix was going to ignore the need to caption altogether. So we are happy to see this move forward on the part of Netflix.
Since Netflix posted its blog, consumers have been responding. In fact, as of May 3, 2010, there were 140 comments posted, with more coming each day. Comments included hearty congratulations like: “Gee! This is Great News!” They also include many who asked: “How do I find those 100 captioned programs?”
If you’d see all the comments and let Netflix know what your thoughts are about captioning on streamed Netflix movies, go to http://blog.netflix.com/
Finally! In-Flight Captions in 2011
We have waited a very long time to see captioning universally available. One of our frustrations has been working with the air carriers to see to it that captions are included on in-flight videos. Well, looks like our wait may be over sometime soon.
According to Mary Kirby’s “Run Way Girl” on the Flight Global website:
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Earlier this month, Academy award-winning deaf actress Marlee Matlin tweeted the following:
"On Continental and they have DirecTV. DirecTV has captions on my TV at home but NONE here. Come on! What will it take? PLS RT"
Marlee makes a good point. Why isn't closed captioning (CC) available on LiveTV's newest generation LTV3 system, which is being fitted to Continental's Boeing domestic fleet?
The answer is that CC is coming to Continental!
LiveTV director of product development Scott Easterling tells RWG: "We are working closely with DirecTV on this to ensure the in-flight version of CC is consistent with their in-home experience. We plan to have the entire LTV3 fleet equipped with CC in the first half of 2011. We are very excited about this feature."
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http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/runway-girl/2010/04/continental-airlines-to-offer.html
HLAA has long advocated for better access at airports and on airplanes. We would very much like to see all airlines provide in-flight captioning and are looking forward to seeing captions on movies on Continental flights in the very near future.
To leave comments with Run Way Girl, visit http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/runway-girl/2010/04/continental-airlines-to-offer.html
To write or email Continental Airlines to let them know how happy you will be when we see in-flight captions, go to http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/content/Contact/location/default.aspx
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