Google just launched a new feature to automatically caption videos. This move was targeted to help people with hearing disability participate more effectively in online video content. SEO experts are now seeing a new avenue to improve their rankings. Ken Harrenstien, the software engineer who designed this feature is deaf himself. Harrenstien noted that he was unable to use most of the video content available today and this feature was bound to help others just like him.

Though the feature in itself is still in its nascent stages the video scripts that now get associated with a video will help give YouTube content a robust presence online. The captions will get indexed on search engines, and the relevancy of video search results will improve as a result.

As of now, few videos online enjoy the companionship of captions. Most videos would rely on just the title and some meta-data for search engine indexing. With captioning, now video can be looked at almost like traditional text content. For example, if a video on cooking is posted, it is likely that words like meat, vegetables etc show up on content. Unlike just relying on the title that says “xyz recipe” the actual video script now will enhance its ranking and relevance to a certain keyword.

Google will be using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to generate English subtitles. Though initially it is said to be limited in performance, it is said to improve in stages as time goes by. YouTube traffic could potentially rise much higher than its current levels as a result. Lot of work has been going on with the image search lately, and this addition to video search could be a vital avenue for internet marketing and SEO of any form.

This automated generation of captions will first be applied to thirteen partner channels. Currently they include channels like UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and some Google and YouTube channels.

Through another feature called Automatic Timing, users can manually add captions to their video. To carry out this task, users will need to supply a text file with the script that is used in the video. It is different from traditional subtitle files (.srt files) in the sense that it does not need to contain any timing information. Google will automatically synchronize the words with the spoken data in the video.

With Google embroiled in anti-trust cases around the globe, this feature certainly does help make Google look less evil than it is made out to be.