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YouTube to offer automatic captions on all video contents

2010-03-05 08:39 BJT

SAN FRANCISCO, March 4 (Xinhua) -- In a move to make its contents accessible to a wider audience, video-sharing website YouTube on Thursday said it is starting to add automatically generated captions to all of its video clips.

"Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users," Hiroto Tokusei, a product manager, announced in a posting on YouTube's official blog.

Currently, auto-captioning is only available for videos where English is spoken, Tokusei said, adding that YouTube plans to broaden the feature to include more languages in the coming months.

Tokusei also cautioned that auto-captions aren't perfect using existing speech recognition technology and like similar application, "auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track."

YouTube began to develop a caption feature in 2008. In November last year, the website released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners.

YouTube believed that auto-captions will be helpful to users including those who have hearing disabilities by making videos more accessible.

According to studies cited by YouTube, a total of over 700 million people worldwide may suffer from hearing impairment by 2015.

Editor: Zheng Limin | Source: Xinhua