YouTube automatic captioning to Revolutionize education

By Partho, Gaea News Network
Saturday, November 21, 2009

A day after publicly revealing its Chrome OS, Google came up with a new YouTube feature. In an interesting revelation YouTube would offer automatic captioning. The new features seems to be inspired by Goolge vice president Vint Cerf who is a hearing impaired.Whatever be the reason YouTube videos with automatic captioning could be a great asset for schools and libraries. Increased accessibility of videos will help deaf students as well as multimodal learners who would be benefited from text accompanying video and audio. YouTube’s new addition would be of great help in schools and other fields of education

YouTube is using Google’s speech-recognition technology for the generating automatic, machine-generated captions. The technology will allow educators to find relevant materials more quickly and discard the junk that also likes to inhabit YouTube. However, the technology is still in progress. Therefore, the captions will only be available for only a few YouTube channels, such PBS, National Geographic and those at a few big universities. YouTube association with the educational and informational channels would offer a vast repository of educational resources for students.

YouTube would add the ability to add transcripts to videos. Given that the speech recognition isn’t perfect users will be able to upload the text, transcribe video, and then automatic timing will advance the text as needed. This could be altogether revolutionize online course content.

Discussion

Dan the Music Master
November 22, 2009: 9:12 am

It is amazing how quickly You Tube keeps re-inventing and improving its features.

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