YouTube Auto-Captioning: A Great Way to Search For Video?

Earlier in the day on Thursday, we reported on YouTube’s latest and greatest feature: auto-captioning. While this surely is a great way to get the hearing impaired folks out there a chance to enjoy the millions of videos, we can’t help but to think about the benefits of auto-captioning for ourselves here. Of course, we’re just thinking wishfully, but who cares, right?

Let’s see — if you’ve got a video which get captioned automatically, those words get stored somewhere on YouTube’s servers. Now what if you can search those auto-captioned words to find an exact spot in a video, or even find a video by the words you hear spoken in it?

It most certainly isn’t preposterous, and we could soon be seeing this implemented into YouTube. Now, of course, back to reality. The fact of the matter is that YouTube’s new implemented ASR (automatic speech recognition) isn’t perfect. So if you’re looking for a video that was filmed at the summit of Everest , chances are the gusting wind and oxygen-deprived climbers won’t be audible.

We’re excited to see where this goes.