YouTube is to introduce automatically-generated captions to its videos, which will be rolled out across the site over the coming months.
Initially captions will be generated in English, but there is scope for other languages. The first wave of these computer-generated captions will be made available on thirteen channels, including National Geographic and most of YouTube’s own channels.
YouTube already offers users the option to caption their own videos, but the feature is rarely used for actually adding subtitles to videos.
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Ken Harrenstien, the software developer behind this new addition to YouTube, is himself deaf. The technology is not one hundred percent accurate yet, but Harrenstien says that it “will continue to improve with time.”
