Google has annouced that automated captioning will be rolled out to YouTube. Only 13 channels will initially use this system which combines speech recognition with manual captioning.

YouTube already provides ‘manual’ captioning but the new system will allow for the use of:

• speech recognition, which will inevitably produce errors although the technology continues to improve
• the uploading of scripts, with auto-timings synchronising the transcript words to the time when they are spoken
• manual captioning as already exists in YouTube

For more information please visit:

The BBC new story on this new release

YouTube captions page