First, let me say that I’m not sure if it’s correct to say “close caption your video” or “closed caption your video.” That aside, YouTube quietly announced some really cool technology today relevant to all of us content producers.  Technically, they announced this in November, but they’re rolling it out to all videos on the site asap.

Using their speech recognition technology YouTube will analyze your uploaded video and add the captions to it automatically.  Not only is this a win for the deaf, it will also help us interpret Scottish hooligans and Bob Dylan.  Although, there’s no way their technology is that good. Speech recognition technology has been terrible for years, but companies like Google and Naturally Speaking with their Dragon Speech software has made tremendous headwinds. 800-Goog-411 is usually very good in my experience. So is the speech recognition on the Google iPhone app.

Our company has to send it’s captioning out of house, and it costs us anywhere from $250-$500 depending on the show length. I’m jumping ahead with my point, and certainly YouTube is not in the business of close captioning broadcast material yet, but this sort of technology is the obvious replacement or rather addition to old-fashioned transcription.

Here’s the demo from YouTube

More info from Gizmodo