Miss-Delectable
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Google offers instant captions on the web to the deaf | The Australian
IF you know anyone who is profoundly deaf, you'll know how frustrating watching TV or downloaded video clips can be for them.
Many shows aren't captioned and others aren't captioned well. Even working out how to turn on the captions can be frustrating. Some months ago YouTube, the online video site owned by Google, began tackling the problem by offering software that promised to automatically turn speech into captions. There's also a beta function to translate captions into other languages to make the videos accessible to a much larger audience.
Alas, the speech-to-text software supplied for the task by Google isn't really up to the task.
It has to deal with accents, different ways of speaking, unclear speech, slangy expressions unknown to its dictionary and many other problems -- and the resulting text is usually full of mistakes, barely understandable or even downright risible. Worse, there's no way of correcting the captions.
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Enter Ken Mayering, a 43-year-old US undergraduate student who has spent a lot of time pondering the problem.
He has now come up with a free, non-profit website called VideoCritter that makes creating captions on any YouTube video a simple matter of typing them in.
It's brilliant. You simply log on to VideoCritter at VideoCritter: A Simple Free Online YouTube Video Captions Creator and Editor, then log on to YouTube and connect to a video clip.
VideoCritter comes up with a natty set of dead-simple controls, including a virtual trackwheel that you can spin forward or back to find the precise moment you want to begin adding captions.
Click on a start button, listen to a phrase or maybe a short sentence by an onscreen speaker, tap an enter button to halt the video, type what has been said, tap enter again to restart the video, and repeat the process.
Your captions appear immediately, neat and easily read, at the bottom of the screen. Correcting any mistakes is easy.
You can add captions to TV news clips -- a short, effective demo on the VideoCritter website shows captions being added to US President Barack Obama's Oval Office speech on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or on your own home movies, once you have uploaded them to YouTube.
Nice one, Ken. The folk at Google or YouTube should make an offer for VideoCritter and put you on the Googleplex payroll.
Or maybe not: in a recent email Meyering told Doubleclick he was learning computer technologies to develop his website into a large cloud computing application able to "collect and serve multimedia content in most of the Earth's human languages".
We wish him good luck.
MEANWHILE, for those interested in translating written words between languages, Google has revamped its Translate website, whose existence we suspect many web surfers don't know about.
The site is less cluttered and easier to use, and there are guides to different ways of using the technology -- for instance, translating incoming messages in the Gmail email service.
A nice touch is to add Google's toolbar to your browser. It works with Internet Explorer or Firefox and is available in beta form for Macs as well as Windows PCs.
The toolbar clutters the top of your screen a little, but adds some useful buttons, including a one-tap Translate button.
You can translate text back and forth between scores of languages and, better still, you can go to a foreign-language website and have Google turn the whole site into English, or the language of your choice.
We tried it by logging on to the website of Le Monde, a French-language daily. A second after clicking the Translate button, the complete first page was in English, headlines, captions and all. Well, English of a sort. You get the general drift of stories but Google Translate sometimes fumbles. For instance, in an item on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 software for a new range of smartphones and tablets, Le Monde noted, "85 per cent des Francais restent a equiper en smartphones". Google translated this as "85 per cent of French are to fit into smartphones", which sounds quite a struggle. A better translation might have been something like "85 per cent of French people have yet to acquire a smartphone".
If you have only a few words to translate, you can do it in the normal Google search bar.
Simply type "translate All You Need Is Love to Spanish", hit Search and, presto, you'll be rewarded with "Todo lo que necesitas es amor".
Couldn't have put it better ourselves.
IF you know anyone who is profoundly deaf, you'll know how frustrating watching TV or downloaded video clips can be for them.
Many shows aren't captioned and others aren't captioned well. Even working out how to turn on the captions can be frustrating. Some months ago YouTube, the online video site owned by Google, began tackling the problem by offering software that promised to automatically turn speech into captions. There's also a beta function to translate captions into other languages to make the videos accessible to a much larger audience.
Alas, the speech-to-text software supplied for the task by Google isn't really up to the task.
It has to deal with accents, different ways of speaking, unclear speech, slangy expressions unknown to its dictionary and many other problems -- and the resulting text is usually full of mistakes, barely understandable or even downright risible. Worse, there's no way of correcting the captions.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
Enter Ken Mayering, a 43-year-old US undergraduate student who has spent a lot of time pondering the problem.
He has now come up with a free, non-profit website called VideoCritter that makes creating captions on any YouTube video a simple matter of typing them in.
It's brilliant. You simply log on to VideoCritter at VideoCritter: A Simple Free Online YouTube Video Captions Creator and Editor, then log on to YouTube and connect to a video clip.
VideoCritter comes up with a natty set of dead-simple controls, including a virtual trackwheel that you can spin forward or back to find the precise moment you want to begin adding captions.
Click on a start button, listen to a phrase or maybe a short sentence by an onscreen speaker, tap an enter button to halt the video, type what has been said, tap enter again to restart the video, and repeat the process.
Your captions appear immediately, neat and easily read, at the bottom of the screen. Correcting any mistakes is easy.
You can add captions to TV news clips -- a short, effective demo on the VideoCritter website shows captions being added to US President Barack Obama's Oval Office speech on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or on your own home movies, once you have uploaded them to YouTube.
Nice one, Ken. The folk at Google or YouTube should make an offer for VideoCritter and put you on the Googleplex payroll.
Or maybe not: in a recent email Meyering told Doubleclick he was learning computer technologies to develop his website into a large cloud computing application able to "collect and serve multimedia content in most of the Earth's human languages".
We wish him good luck.
MEANWHILE, for those interested in translating written words between languages, Google has revamped its Translate website, whose existence we suspect many web surfers don't know about.
The site is less cluttered and easier to use, and there are guides to different ways of using the technology -- for instance, translating incoming messages in the Gmail email service.
A nice touch is to add Google's toolbar to your browser. It works with Internet Explorer or Firefox and is available in beta form for Macs as well as Windows PCs.
The toolbar clutters the top of your screen a little, but adds some useful buttons, including a one-tap Translate button.
You can translate text back and forth between scores of languages and, better still, you can go to a foreign-language website and have Google turn the whole site into English, or the language of your choice.
We tried it by logging on to the website of Le Monde, a French-language daily. A second after clicking the Translate button, the complete first page was in English, headlines, captions and all. Well, English of a sort. You get the general drift of stories but Google Translate sometimes fumbles. For instance, in an item on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 software for a new range of smartphones and tablets, Le Monde noted, "85 per cent des Francais restent a equiper en smartphones". Google translated this as "85 per cent of French are to fit into smartphones", which sounds quite a struggle. A better translation might have been something like "85 per cent of French people have yet to acquire a smartphone".
If you have only a few words to translate, you can do it in the normal Google search bar.
Simply type "translate All You Need Is Love to Spanish", hit Search and, presto, you'll be rewarded with "Todo lo que necesitas es amor".
Couldn't have put it better ourselves.