YouTube automatic captions now in six European languages

Captions are important to make sure everyone—including deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages—can enjoy videos on YouTube.

In 2009, you first saw a feature that automatically creates captions on YouTube videos in English, and since then we’ve added Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Today, hundreds of millions of people speaking six more languages—German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch—will have automatic caption support for YouTube videos in those languages. Just click the closed caption button on any of these videos to see how it works:



Now in 10 languages, automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute. As automatic captions will have some errors, creators also have several tools to improve the quality of their captions. Automatic captions can be a starting point, where creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. Creators can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronized captions.

You now have around 200 million videos with automatic and human-created captions on YouTube, and we continue to add more each day to make YouTube accessible for all.

Hoang Nguyen, software engineer, recently watched “Completo, ilha das flores.”

Auto-Captions now available in Japanese

Cross Posted from the YouTube Japan Blog.

Last March we offered everyone the ability to automatically create captions on your videos, and the response has been exciting to see: auto-captions have been generated on nearly 40 million videos, and the number of manually-created caption tracks has more than tripled. We’re eager to see more videos captioned in more languages, so we just rolled out this feature to a new language — Japanese.

Now on any video with a clear Japanese speech track, a red “CC” button will appear at the bottom of the player, where you can click it to generate automatic captions from the speech. We’re also working closely with the the Japan Federation for the Deaf to improve this technology and make it more useful.

Here’s an example of how it works from our partner ANN News Channel:



And if you really want to get multilingual with YouTube videos, when these auto-captions are combined with our auto-translate feature, you’ll be able to generate subtitles into more than 50 languages.

Keeping up with our Japanese partners just got that much easier.

Brad Ellis, Product Manager, YouTube Japan, recently watched “手話あいらんど手話教室入門コース.”