Auto-Captions now available in Japanese

Cross Posted from the YouTube Japan Blog.

Last March we offered everyone the ability to automatically create captions on your videos, and the response has been exciting to see: auto-captions have been generated on nearly 40 million videos, and the number of manually-created caption tracks has more than tripled. We’re eager to see more videos captioned in more languages, so we just rolled out this feature to a new language — Japanese.

Now on any video with a clear Japanese speech track, a red “CC” button will appear at the bottom of the player, where you can click it to generate automatic captions from the speech. We’re also working closely with the the Japan Federation for the Deaf to improve this technology and make it more useful.

Here’s an example of how it works from our partner ANN News Channel:



And if you really want to get multilingual with YouTube videos, when these auto-captions are combined with our auto-translate feature, you’ll be able to generate subtitles into more than 50 languages.

Keeping up with our Japanese partners just got that much easier.

Brad Ellis, Product Manager, YouTube Japan, recently watched “手話あいらんど手話教室入門コース.”