Automatic Closed Captioning for your Youtube Videos
Since being introduced years ago, closed captioning, subtitles and video captions have been useful television consumers who are hearing impaired or deaf. Closed captioning allows users who have hearing difficulties to enjoy a television program or video by displaying subtitles and words at the bottom of the screen. Closed captioning has already made its way to online video and YouTube has added two new features that are useful for both the hearing impaired and everyone else.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, recently added in “automatic captions” to its online videos. Available on most education channels, “automatic captions” transcribes and adds captions to the bottom of the screen. “Automatic captions” also allows for the captions to be translated into other languages. Even though the captions are not 100% accurate at times, it still allows the user to understand the video content.
In addition to “automatic captions”, YouTube also added an “automatic timing” feature. To make adding closed captioning easier, “automatic timing” shows videos owners when words are mentioned in the online video. With the help of a simple text transcript, Google will help the video owner save a file of the words said in the online video to add later on. Once this transcript is saved, a simple upload is needed to add closed captioning to the video.
Though it is designed to help the hearing impaired, these new features could help search engines find online videos in the near future. Search engines employ a spider (also referred to as a-crawler) look for certain keywords within the text, title tags and content of a web-site or description of an online video. With closed captioning and text being added to online videos, this could be an opportunity to optimize online video content for a search engine. Spiders are designed to look for specific keywords and if keywords can be found within an online video closed caption, it could help optimize the video for a search engine.
