How to get your YouTube account ready for auto captions?

YouTube comes up with a lot of innovation from editing your videos online to watching television shows online. Recently YouTube announced recently that all the videos they have will have automatic closed captions enabled. The feature is available with many videos but not all. Apparently YouTube will take a little bit of time to give all the videos captions.

What are automatic closed captions?

Auto captions are captions or subtitles in English being generated automatically by YouTube.  It mixes voice search and speech to text technology to auto generate captions for clear spoken English in the YouTube video.

How to get You Tube auto captions for a viewer?

  • If you want auto captions enabled on your account for viewing videos with captions visit YouTube account settings.
  • Here I needed to click on ‘Playback setting‘ and check show captions. I selected ‘Always show automatic captions‘. This will make sure that all videos I see will have automatic captions.
  • Now when you search for the video results you will see a ‘CC’ next to the results to indicate that it has closed captions enabled.

How to get YouTube auto captions for a uploader?

  • Sign into your account.
  • Here I needed to click on ‘Captions and Subtitles
  • Now here we can see any video for which we can suggest auto captions. I did not see this options as none of my videos generated had spoken words in them.

This means that if you are uploading demos on You Tube, there is no need for you to come up with captions or use subtitles. All you need to do is enable Auto captions. Do pay attention to the English words and a requirement is the speech should be clear.

Well hope this helps DW’s readers who are YouTube addicts and do let me know your opinions through your comments.

Link: YouTube

2 Comments

Sourish | How To Start A Blog March 8, 2010

wow , i cant believe that. Subtitles using video voice recognitions. That would be awesome. I will try that . Can we do that to videos already posted ? Is there any requirement of file format, clarity . Im sure this system cant be full proof and it would make silly mistakes like “as” will show “as*”

Aditya Kane March 8, 2010

The auto caption will self learn and hence the captions will get better in terms of quality. The main criteria is clear spoken English in the video.