Google Inc. said Thursday it is introducing automatic, machine-generated captions for videos on its YouTube site. The new service, being launched this week, is intended to make online videos accessible to the deaf and hearing-impaired.
So Google is tapping into the speech-recognition technology that it uses for its Google Voice call management service to make captions an automatic feature on YouTube.
In the meantime, Google is adding a new “auto-timing” feature to its existing manual captioning service to make it easier to use. Video creators will now simply have to create a text file with all the words spoken in a video and Google’s speech recognition technology will take it from there — matching the text to the words as they are spoken. Google hopes this will encourage more users to add captions to their videos.
So now Google knows what you read, knows what you write, and now knows the content of videos. By translating audio to text, Google, presumably can now index the transcript of a video. Omniveillance is looming on the horizon.
