This week, Google sealed the deal on video search capabilities for its YouTube portal, saying it would provide auto-captions for all of its uploaded videos using proprietary Google’s Speech Technology.
Google’s initiative, piloted in November, began with a handful of partner channels including PBS, Stanford University and National Geographic. It has now expanded to all uploaded English-speaking videos, with more languages to be added later this year.
With this news, Google establishes itself as a frontrunner in the Internet programming space. As a company built on search, search, and more search, Google is now able to capitalize on its investment in speech-to-text technology to index videos, target advertising and create an actual profit margin for YouTube. In fact, video search is likely why Google acquired YouTube in the first place.
The bigger news is that auto-captions will have clear benefits for the deaf and hearing-impaired population, who now will be able to better understand dialogue on uploaded videos. Up to now, this group had to rely on the goodwill of YouTube users to manually add captions to their videos. A time-consuming process, most users didn’t bother to do so.
