 "YouTube adds 6 languages to automatic caption support")
Hoang Nguyen, software engineer at YouTube, shares in an official blog post that users will be able to view automatic captions in videos in six more languages. The automatic captions are now available in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch. The post adds that back in 2009, a feature automatically creating captions on YouTube videos in English was introduced. YouTube has since added Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
Nguyen writes, "…automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute." Nguyen goes on to share that there are chances that these automatic captions will have errors, and to this end, creators will have many tools to improve the quality of the captions.
Nguyen adds that with automatic captions in tow, creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. They can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronised 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,” Nguyen concludes.
Breaking the language barrier
To let users try it out for themselves, the post has 6 videos wherein they can click the closed caption button on any of the videos.
Exciting things are happening at Google. Users will soon have the option to link their YouTube channel with their Google+ page. It will now be possible for the user to set his or her channel name (never mind the spaces) as his Google identity. The post also shares that the advanced Google+ page management features that allow up to 50 people to manage a single Google+ page, or one person to manage up to 50 Google+ pages, will work for channels that have been linked with Google+ pages. Folks at Google have been trying this option with Google Analytics, YouTube Creators, etc., and are planning to make this feature available to all creators in the weeks to come. The upcoming features build upon Google’s attempts to enable YouTube users to change the way they appear on the platform, by using their Google+ profile on their YouTube channel. Users may have spotted prompts inviting them to use their Google identity on YouTube.
Moreover, YouTube is now rewarding more engaging videos with higher rankings. The videos that users spend more time watching will appear higher than others in search results on YouTube. YouTube, in an official blog post reveals that the newest change is a result of its attempts at pegging instances of video discovery to the amount of time spent in watching them. The move comes after YouTube made changes to Suggested Videos in March, and recent improvements to YouTube Analytics.
YouTube shares that the results far have been positive so far, whereby it has registered more users watching than clicking. With this, YouTube shares that it expects users to spend more time watching videos from search and across the site. Importantly, video channels should benefit from this if their videos get more watching minutes, quite like what other optimisation did to its discovery features.
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