A few days ago, Youtube announced the launch of automatically generated captions for videos. Basically, you don't have to bother with Capiontube anymore (link in this article) to manually create captions for videos, export them, and import them in Youtube.
To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.
Pretty cool! However, as a video marketer, this feature is making me lose an edge in the service I offer to some companies to boost the visibility of their video on Google's SERPs. Captions are a very little-known trick to add data to your video, thus making it more discoverable. How does that work?
As explained in Google's post about the release of automatic captions:
captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.
So first if your video had captions, then it was easier for Google to suggest it to a foreign-speaking audience, since the caption text could instantly be translated.
Also, by having text illustrating a video as it rolls, Google is getting a deep insight on what's going on inside the video. To clarify things, a machine cannot analyze a video the way the human eye and brain does. For example, when Youtube gets a video, the title-description-tags are important, but not enough to make indexing accurate. Clicks between related videos is another way Youtube understands the content of a video. Embeds are also a great opportunity for Youtube to index the content around a video and spot keywords. However, until now, Google/Youtube were only getting hints about the content of a video. Starting today, what's being said in a video won't be a mystery anymore.
The power of closed captions goes beyond indexing. As mentioned in an older post on the Google Video Blog:
If your search results include caption snippets, there will be a link called "Start playing at search term", which is extremely handy for long videos.
This means that in a very near future, when you will upload a video from your Flip for example, what's being said will be indexed right away, and with a little Pubsubhubbub love, anything that's been said in the video could show up on top of Google's SERPs if Google finds it relevant, exactly at the moment when it's being said.
So watch your mouth! Nobody is used to a system that records everything and makes it available to the World. You would not want to get home someday and notice that the comment you made about the President of your country's been picked up on video, escalated to the top of Google's SERPs, and inevitably picked up by major news publishers.
My point is that closed captions have never been a popular feature in Youtube, despite its amazing ability to make a video discoverable. Now that captions are automatically added to the mix, i's going to change a lot of things regarding Google's universal search results.
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