New article: YouTube’s automatic captioning system can now describe sound effects read more at here http://www.spinonews.com/index.php/technology/item/3125-youtube-s-automatic-captioning-system-can-now-describe-sound-effects

YouTube announced a sound effect captioning system for its video platform collaborating with Sound Understanding and Accessibility teams. The automatic sound effect captioning system will identify and label sounds in the video without manual input.

With machine learning, YouTube will be able to automatically detect the existence of sound effects in a video and transcribe it to appropriate classes or sound labels. 

The company announced, the technology is now able to take this a step further by also captioning some of the ambient sounds like [LAUGHTER], [APPLAUSE] and [MUSIC].

The new changes will help the 360 million people around the world who have problems in hearing. The company has made several changes to cater to these users, and claims that the number of videos with automatic captions now exceeds 1 billion while adding that people watch videos with automatic captions more than 15 million times per day.

Noah Wang, Software Engineer, said, we started this project by taking on a wide variety of challenges, such as how to best design the sound effect recognition system and what sounds to prioritize.

The company adds that its new captioning tech is still in the early stages of recognizing sound effects automatically. YouTube lists some more challenges that will make video watching experience even better for the targeted users.

 

Future challenges might include adding other common sound classes like ringing, barking and knocking, which present particular problems for example, with ringing we need to be able to decipher if this is an alarm clock, a door or a phone.