Sunday 28 March 2010

Captions on Videos

The University of Nottingham's "Alternative Formats Service" has produced English captions for 10 of my YouTube videos.

It was bit of a pilot project but we're hoping more can be done... Let us know what you think?

Here are the 10 videos we captioned across various projects.

You switch on captions using the little triangle icon at the bottom right corner of the video player.

BALLOON WORLD RECORD



SOLAR ECLIPSE



ENERGY BAGS



GENESIS



GOLD IN AQUA REGIA



CHLORINE



ISAAC NEWTON



SILVER



BROMINE



MATTHEW

6 comments:

  1. Wow.. really nice. This will allow me to watch your videos at work (no sound) :) I wasn't familiar with these features before...the translator can be very useful. It may not produce a perfect translation, but it looks good enough to get an idea.

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  2. Hi @celeph

    I don't think work viewing was our primary purpose for adding captions, but glad they're useful!

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  3. Hi. If you are interested in having your videos captioned with better timing and making them fully searchable, I'd be happy to discuss that and see if we may be of assistance.

    Here is a link to a sample of our work. We can customize and brand the player, and we can make it work on your site and search across your entire video collection.
    http://www.realtimetranscription.com/showcase/randypausch/index.php

    Tanya English, Technology Director
    Realtime Transcription
    tenglish@realtimetranscription.com
    www.transendia.com

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  4. Brady, thank you for posting this, you will know that my 'driver' is accessibility for those of us who cannot hear the commentary. However, there are a number of other good reasons for captions, access in shared spaces, acces to the 'British' accent etc.
    It is particularly that these can be switched on and off (we wouldn't want to upset artisitic sensitivities unnecssarily).

    I think they are pretty good for now, hopefully with Google real time auto transcription coming along they will be even better.

    Cheers
    Chris Baxter

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  5. Chris,

    I still think the Google/YouTube automatic ones have a long way to go... The results are comic and not very useful in most of the examples I've seen on my videos...

    But those Google folk are pretty smart... I'm sure they'll improve quickly.

    Brady

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  6. Hi Brady
    I agree, having seen the one on the website posted here! Welcome to my sometimes very confusing world, even the BBC don't do so well at real time catptioning - it means you need to be a mind reading genius to understand them - good job I am one!

    With the voice recognition tech though things should improve as the tech has more exposure to the task, called 'training' I believe.

    In the meantime I am workign on the funding question for all your vids!

    Cheers

    Chris
    chrisbaxteruon on Twitter

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