Automatic Captions

I recently saw this new feature discussed on the Google blog. It takes Youtube videos and automatically adds captions to them. The obvious application is the assistance to the hearing impaired. However, I think the potential of this type of technology is pretty cool, especially when applied to searching content without user effort to tag media.

Google also claims the captions can be downloaded into text. If you want to quote someone from a video, this makes it significantly easier. The use of captions can also be tied to certain cues in the video so you can skip to particular sections with ease.

Google translation tools can also translate video captions to other languages. Talk about crossing languages and making videos global...

A small blurb on the news but I see huge potential impacts and uses.