Advertisement

YouTube's automatic captions service adds six additional languages

Building upon the work Google began in 2009, YouTube is now extending its automatic captioning reach to six additional languages. Previously, the transcription service was only available to speakers of English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish, but as of today, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch have also been added to the fold. Auto-caps, as the company calls it, works by employing the same voice recognition algorithms used within Google Voice, but as anyone familiar with that speech software can attest, it's not always error-free. So, expect some things to be (unintentionally and somewhat amusingly) lost in translation. Speaking of which, with the site's recent inclusion of the search giant's translation software, users will also have the option take their captioned vids and make them readable across a variety of languages. YouTube: building linguistic bridges across the internet's borders.