If you’ve used YouTube recently, you’ve probably noticed that many of the videos on the site now feature subtitles or closed captioning. And, if you’re even more astute, you might have noticed a CC button that allows you to turn on closed captioning for just about any video on the site.
What’s going on here? Well, YouTube has introduced a new feature that lets people add a closed captioning file to their videos when they upload them to the site. For those videos that don’t have a CC file, they’re using speech to text technology to generate the subtitles. This technology is something that is being implemented by companies like Adobe in video editing software. Basically, it lets the computer do the work of figuring out what was said so that the user doesn’t have to type it all in.
To some, this might seem like an odd feature for YouTube to be adding. But we must remember that YouTube is owned by Google and Google specializes in search. Allowing the actual words in videos to be indexed means that YouTube can do a much better job of searching for particular videos and can, hopefully, create a better experience for its users using this method. In addition, it brings Google one step closer to indexing all the world’s information.
Want to read a little more? Check out ReelSEO’s article on YouTube’s speech to text technology.
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