>> Daisy Whitney: Hey there, I'm Daisy Whitney reporting for Beet.TV and NBC Bay Area here
at Google's headquarters. Google recently introduced automatic captioning for its videos
on YouTube and we're going to talk about what that means and what it means for users with
a software engineer.
So Ken, you have some interesting updates with what's happening with YouTube and captions.
Can you walk us through some of the new products, updates that you have?
>> Ken Harrenstien: Sure. Two things we just announced a few weeks ago: 1) automatic captioning
and 2) automatic timing. And to me it's some of the most important things that we've done
so far. Obviously the captions themselves are very important for many reasons. Would
you like me to explain the reasons?
>> Daisy Whitney: Yes I would.
>> Ken Harrenstien: Sure. Okay. Well obviously we need captions for someone like myself when
I watch video. Two, there's other people who speak a different language but can understand
English if they read it or another language, and the captions allow us to translate the
language to theirs. So it's not just access to me, a deaf person, but it's access for
the world. The third, we have people who, for whatever reason, like to have the sound
off. Maybe they're busy, maybe they're on a train, on a bus, maybe it's at night and
they don't want to wake up somebody.
And fourth, because captions are text, guess what, you can search on that text. And at
Google, we can use that, for example, to find exactly where in the video you have a special
snippet and jump straight to that part of the video. And for a short video maybe it
doesn't matter, but for a movie, ooh wow, it really helps a lot. And if you're searching
for a class lecture on physics, maybe you want to skip the boring parts and go straight
to what you need to know.
>> Daisy Whitney: So it improves searchability on YouTube?
>> Ken Harrenstien: Yes. Now, I need to follow up. Two things I want to add. Basically it
makes it easier to create captions for videos because we have so much content now. The number
is every minute we have 20 hours of more video being uploaded to YouTube. That's a lot. I
mean, a lot of videos are already captioned, but it's just a very small amount compared
to what's coming in.
So I figured, fortunately the timing is right to hook up a lot of important things at Google
and hook them together to make this happen. We linked speech recognition to the technology.
Suppose you have a video; it doesn't yet have captions. The captions are uploaded by the
people who own the video. I think it's easy, but for many people it's not easy. They have
to type the words, they have to find the time, they have to upload the file, so some people
don't bother. But now, if we can recognize the speech in the video, we can generate captions
for you. That's early--it's only available on a few educational channels and government
channels and we're trying to roll it out as fast as we can.
But the second thing, automatic timing. Suppose okay you're willing to type in the words for
the transcript--that's all you have to do. You upload that file and we will use speech
recognition to find out when those words were spoken and change them into captions. We actually
use that technique ourselves at Google for a lot of YouTube videos.
>> Daisy Whitney: So if I upload this video to YouTube, what do I need to do as a user?
Do I need to create a transcript and upload that transcript so that there can be captions
for this video for instance?
>> Ken Harrenstien: Okay, there's two things you can do. First, if you were one of the
partners for whom this is enabled, then we will do speech recognition for you. It won't
be perfect, but you can take that, fix it up, and upload it as real captions and it
will be perfect. Or the second thing we can do. Often you can write down the transcript
of what people say in the video, upload that file, and we will do the rest. And I hope
you do!
>> Daisy Whitney: Who are your partners right now for whom you do the automatic captioning?
And is your goal at some point to do automatic captioning for every video? Is that even possible?
>> Ken Harrenstien: Obviously because of our, I mean Google's, mission statement, we want
to make everything accessible to everyone. And we will get there someday, maybe. But
for now, the list of partners, we have that on our blog post. We just recently added a
lot more. Sorry I forget the list.
>> Daisy Whitney: We'll get it. We'll look it up. What do you see as the value for publishers
and content owners?
>> Ken Harrenstien: Hopefully we'll make it so much easier for them to add captions and
then they will. And if they can't, for whatever reason, we will do the best we can. And I
think very soon we will start to notice that it really makes a difference in how many people
watch their videos.
>> Daisy Whitney: More views. What does it mean for you personally?
>> Ken Harrenstien: Well I've dreamed about this for many years of course. It's a funny
thing, I don't have a lot of time to watch videos myself because I have three small children,
but if they want to watch something, I like to understand what they're watching too. So
it's great.
>> Daisy Whitney: That is great. Thank you so much.