Listen to this as a podcast:
In May of this year (yes, I’m a little behind, sorry) Apple updated their QuickTime media to include support for closed captioning. This is very good – the road to bringing captions to the online world has been filled with potholes, and Apple’s recent update has helped make the road a little bit smoother. There is still a long way to go, however. TV episodes and movies downloaded through iTunes still lack captions, although they have no reason to now.
The update includes separate versions for OSX and Windows.
Previously:
iTunes and closed captioning
Closed captioning on movie trailers
Casting Words transcripting services
Speche Communications: real time text streaming
Jott’s potential to transcribe podcasts is unrealized
Earize Text Streaming for Internet Radio
Podcast transcripts for the deaf
so here’s the next step that I haven’t seen yet: free or cheap voice to text programs that can analyze a video clip and match (or at least come close to matching) the speakers within the clip.
as a web video producer, I’d love to provide CC for my viewers but can’t provide the man-hours nessesary to transcribe full content of any of my clips.
From Kathryn:
Unfortunately, voice to text technology requires much more work and as far as I know, I don’t think there is a free voice to text transcribing service that can do what you’re asking. The few free ones I’ve seen (like Jott, which I’ve blogged about) only do short 30-second clips. Technology keeps improving in leaps and bounds, and hopefully in the future we will see this. Bit by bit it’s all beginning to come together.