YouTube Introduces Automatic Captions for Deaf Viewers
According to this BBC article, YouTube’s parent company Google has announced on its blog that automatic captions are to begin to roll out across the site.
The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found on 13 channels.
These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels.
The software engineer behind the technology, Ken Harrenstien, is deaf.
Currently YouTube offers a manual captioning service but video makers tend not to use it.
“The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me,” Mr Harrenstien wrote in the Google blog.
His solution combines automatic speech recognition with the current caption system.
The translation is not always perfect (in a demonstration the phrase “sim card” becomes “salmon” in text), but Mr Harrenstien says that the technology “will continue to improve with time”.
Posted in: General
LinkedIn Partners With Twitter For Live Status Updates
LinkedIn, the professional social network, has partnered with Twitter to allow members to share status updates between their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
The integration of the two networks through the Tweets app lets members of LinkedIn automatically share their updates on the professional network with their Twitter followers.
They can also select Twitter status updates to share with their LinkedIn network by adding the #in hashtag to tweets on the micro-blogging site. LinkedIn members will be able to track and manage their Twitter feed from within their LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn has 51m members, including 11m in Europe and almost 3m in the UK.
The new feature will be available to all LinkedIn members globally over the next few days.
Posted in: General
