Technology

Technology

YouTube adds captions. Find out why. YouTube is adding captions to millions of Internet videos. The feature provides viewers a deeper understanding of a video. Adding captions and subtitles makes a videos more accessible to people who can't follow along with the audio—either because they speak a different language, or because they are deaf or hard of hearing.

The feature unveiled Thursday expands upon speech-recognition technology that YouTube began using to make captions available on a limited number of videos late last year.

YouTube's audience will be able to request captions at the press of a button. Video producers will also be able to download the automated captions and improve upon them.

For now, YouTube's captioning tool will only work on videos with English audio, although there are plans to include more languages. The English audio, however, can be translated into 50 different languages.

YouTube, owned by Google, is the Web's most popular video site. Its users upload about 28,800 hours of video each day.

- Posted on March 5, 2010
Submitted by nels833 on Wednesday, 09/01/2010 - 14:54.

It will help def people and people with hearing disorders i think this should be useful because almost the entire population of teens use youtube.

Submitted by reed394 on Wednesday, 09/01/2010 - 14:51.

I think the captions would be good for people who can't hear very good. So then they will be able to read what other people can hear.

Submitted by CodyStern on Friday, 08/20/2010 - 12:18.

I think this would be very helpful to people. If someone is deaf they can hear it, along with the reasons stated above. This is/ will be a very useful addition to YouTube. I can't wait to see what it looks like.

Submitted by Jazen on Wednesday, 05/26/2010 - 19:36.

This has been very useful but at the same time very annoying! You're watching a video and all of a sudden something pops up which kinda disturbs you. You know what I mean?

Submitted by charlesthomas on Wednesday, 05/26/2010 - 15:46.

I can see this coming in handy for deaf people and people that are hard of hearing, but not people from other places because why would they come here if they can't speak our language? There is no point for it, but I would like to fool around with this new part of Youtube and see what it can and can not do, just for fun. =P

Submitted by t.boyle on Tuesday, 05/25/2010 - 14:34.

this is a good idea because not everyone can hear the same as others, but some of the videos on youtube i wouldn't want my kids listening to.