YouTube automatic captioning to Revolutionize education

A day after publicly revealing its Chrome OS, Google came up with a new YouTube feature. In an interesting revelation YouTube would offer automatic captioning. The new features seems to be inspired by Goolge vice president Vint Cerf who is a hearing impaired.

Whatever be the reason YouTube videos with automatic captioning could be a great asset for schools and libraries. Increased accessibility of videos will help deaf students as well as multimodal learners who would be benefited from text accompanying video and audio.

YouTube's new addition would be of great help in schools and other fields of education.

YouTube is using Google's speech-recognition technology for the generating automatic, machine-generated captions. The technology will allow educators to find relevant materials more quickly and discard the junk that also likes to inhabit YouTube. However, the technology is still in progress.

Therefore, the captions will only be available for only a few YouTube channels, such PBS, National Geographic and those at a few big universities. YouTube association with the educational and informational channels would offer a vast repository of educational resources for students.

YouTube would add the ability to add transcripts to videos. Given that the speech recognition isn’t perfect users will be able to upload the text, transcribe video, and then automatic timing will advance the text as needed. This could be altogether revolutionize online course content.

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Is your ISP throttling your network connection?

If you aren’t sure, you will soon be able to download a tool from Google that will tell you once and for all if they are.

If ISP’s aren’t going to tell their users exactly what is happening with their network connections, Google wants to make sure that these people have the ability to tell for themselves. This announcement is Google’s most recent attempt at raising awareness about net neutrality.

This isn’t the first time someone has made software to monitor your network to figure out if your ISP is doing anything fishy, NNSquad Network Measurement Agent is a tool that does exactly that already. In fact, this might actually be the tool Google is referring to. Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet Evangelist, is part of the NNSquad already.

It’s unclear what kind of effect something like this will have on the network neutrality debate, but it certainly can’t hurt.

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