Video marketing has greatly grown in popularity, because it is one of the mediums used to expose a brand to millions of viewers. Internet marketers who have experience exposing websites and brands using SEO (search engine optimization) have spread their marketing abilities to video sharing platforms found online. YouTube is an online video sharing platforms which is greatly used by internet marketers. This article will explore the use of YouTube’s audio transcription and closed captioning services as video marketing methods.

Video marketing is definitely a field which every business owner should strive to learn. Google has been improving and broaden the scope of search engine results by launching a beta machine for the transcription of online videos. The beta machine is accessible to YouTube and Google, but video owners have to manually upload active transcripts and YouTube closed captioning. It is important to note that these technologies are still relatively in their early stages and the result is still dependent on the clarity of audio accompanying the video. In the end, uploading your own transcript to accompany your YouTube video is the best bet to guarantee accuracy.

The best way to gauge the capabilities of Google transcription is to simply try it out. From your YouTube account select a video and edit it. From the editing options choose caption/subtitles and then download Google’s beta machine to your computer. You will then be able to access the file using note pad or any other text editor to view the contents.

Since Google has now accommodated audio transcripts, it would be beneficial for you to come up with transcripts for your videos. These transcripts will prove to be highly useful, because Google crawler can access them and broaden the reach of your message/brand/website online. The great thing is that you can provide as many transcripts in different languages, to further broaden the reach of your video/website/brand. It is easier to have an English transcript and use Google Translate to create multiple language versions of the transcript.

It is also important to note that not all audio transcription providers will provide closed captioning. You can manually insert time codes to your videos using your Google machine transcription file or an equivalent online service. The transcription might seem like an arduous task and most people generally don’t have time to carry out the task personally. YouTube closed captioning might appear to be technical for some people and in this case the best choice would be to outsource the services of an online marketing service provider. more on YouTube transcription

Google announced on the first week of May 2010 that it had released YouTube video transcription services. Although this was released in 2009 the beta version of the You Tube video transcription was only available to a few selected Government agencies, New Broadcasters and universities.

The history of technology that deals with speech recognition can be traced back to the 1930’s. This was a time when AT&T Bell Laboratories came up with a primitive device that was used to recognize speech. Researchers were aware that the extensive use of speech recognition would have to depend on ability to consistently and accurately perceive complex and subtle verbal input. Advancements in speech recognition were very slow because the computing technology that was used was not very good.

The capabilities of numerous electronic devices have outdone the most expensive and best technologies developed in the 1930’s, 50 years later.  This was mostly due to breakthroughs made in semiconductor fabrications and in chip. Computer speed and power which were mainly the barriers were no longer an issue to the accuracy and speed of speech recognition.

Programmers were able to develop algorithms and decode and code a number of voice patterns with more computing power than that which was used in the 1930’s. This meant that they could build a database of various voice patterns and convert them to digital sine waves thus analyze the words that are based on the voice pattern signals. As speech to text know-how improves over the years, they became simpler to use thus a number of companies like Google Voice, Microsoft (Vista, XP), Dragon Dictation and other niche organizations started offering the services to their clients.

The question to ask here is the reliability of the technologies particularly through Google YouTube transcription and will they ever take over the human accuracy?

Individuals who watch YouTube clips with captions may have noticed that the accuracy has improved over the past few months. This is set to go on as time goes by. This has been seconded by the CEO of Google Inc Eric Schmidt who says that it is a self learning technology which will improve over time.

Some of the flaws however that have been observed include:

1. Accuracy captioning is only possible when the speaker is clear and distinct.
2. The environment has to be silent
3. Errors can occur because of similar words
4. Interjections
5. Psychological satisfaction is the major downfall as the material transcribed has to be proof read several times to be sure of accuracy.

It therefore means that humans are still the better option when it comes to transcription.