Way back in 2009 the folks from Google finally added closed captions to YouTube, since then they’ve been updating as many videos as they can, adding more languages, and improving the option. Today Google has announced on the official YouTube Blog that they’ve added 6 brand new languages to their automatic caption system. Last year they added a few, and now European countries have more options.
Available starting today YouTube will now offer automatic closed captions to many parts of Europe. At first it only supported English, and they eventually added 3 additional options. Today however you’ll now get new CC in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch. Just click the closed caption button on any of the supported videos to see how it works.
This brings the total number of languages supported by YouTube’s captions feature to 10. Closed captions are not supported on all videos, and you see it even less on Android smartphones and tablets, but the option is available if needed. While Google is working hard to automatically add them to as many videos as possible, most I’ve tried to watch on mobile lately still don’t have them included.
Google is quick to point out that currently over 200 million videos have closed caption support, and they continue to add more each and every day. Their automatic system is adding them, and users have more and more options to upload and edit them themselves on their own videos should they chose. The system works similar to Android’s current voice recognition and dictation — so sometimes it can be wrong. I’m still not seeing many for mobile, but they’re out there. Video creators are encouraged to transcribe their videos, or edit them if they see mistakes.
[via SlashGear]
