Duke YouTube Gets Captions

Viewers who are deaf or hearing impaired can now join the audience for Duke University's YouTube channel as a result of new speech-to-text technology that adds closed captions automatically to the online videos. (For instructions on enabling captions, see sidebar below.)

Duke is among about a dozen channels trying out the new "auto-captions" option that Google announced last month. Google is adding the option gradually to the videos of the participating institutions.

In addition to helping viewers who are hearing impaired, the captions make the video content more accessible to those who speak a different language. Machine translations are available in 51 languages.

Duke videos have been viewed more than three million times on YouTube. Those that have already received the closed captions range from an interview with professor Jen'nan Read about the impact of Sept. 11 on Muslim women to a recent feature about Duke football coach David Cutcliffe explaining football strategy to groups of Duke students.

The automated captions are imperfect. In the Cutcliffe video, for example, a reference to a "one-on-one breakdown" is transcribed as a "war on one break down." Nonetheless, the captions are generally accurate and will continue to improve with time, according to Obadiah Greenberg, who oversees YouTube's strategic partnerships with universities.

"This gives us a great opportunity to explore how to make the wealth of public Duke videos searchable and accessible to a wider audience -- from non-native speakers to the hearing impaired, as well as those whose learning styles benefit from text annotation," said Samantha Earp, director of academic services for Duke's Office of Information Technology.

YouTube is working with Duke and the other participating institutions to gather feedback about the new captions feature and refine it in advance of a broader launch, Greenberg said.