Google adds captions to YouTube videos

According to an article from The New York Times, Google has added technology to the YouTube website that will automatically insert English text captions into the videos. This will make the videos accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired, as well as to users across the world because the text captions can be translated into 51 languages. The new technology will also help users search for specific text within a video. There are already captioned videos available on YouTube but the captions are either added manually or the videos are from networks that include captions. Initially Google will add the caption technology to its own educational videos and those from Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia, MIT, PBS, National Geographic, and a few other channels. The technology will be expanded to other channels gradually so that it can be tested. Google has also introduced an additional service to make it easier to use the manual caption technology. Users can upload a text file with the words in the video and the technology will match up the text to the words as they are spoken.