YouTube videos now have Live Captions

Watching videos on YouTube just got a bit easier to understand, thanks to the launch of Live Captions at the Google  I/O 2011 conference for developers in San Francisco today.

According to Google’s Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black, the service is available to all of YouTube's partners or even competing live stream sites to improve video viewing experience for all users (particularly those with hearing impediments but also to make sense of foreign clips).

This announcement is not the same as the automatic captioning function YouTube unveiled last year, because auto captioning is about as accurate as asking Google to translate "raining cats and dogs" into Chinese. Live Captions is inputed by real human beings in real-time.

As someone who doesn't have hearing problems, I've always found it challenging to transcribe videos of conferences/meetups that only exist on YouTube, and and have silently wished for some way for videos to show standardized captions for a while now. Finally, we can just watch videos without having to turn on the volume or put on headphones. Thanks for listening, Google.