YouTube Audio Transcription

YouTube added a feature that generates video captions. 'We've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.'

The feature only works for English and it's been enabled for a small number of channels that usually feature talks and interviews: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke,UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic.



Another new feature is auto-timing, which lets you upload the transcription of a video and it automatically generates the time codes. 'All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video.'

Since Google's speech recognition technology is not perfect, it would be useful to generate the captions and then to manually edit them to correct the mistakes.

Automatic captions make YouTube videos more accessible: you can watch videos with the sound off and you can translate the captions into another language using Google Translate.

Web Browsers for Dummies

Considering the amount of time everyone spends online today, it is funny that many people still don't know what a web browser is, even though they use it every day.

The following video is a questionnaire conducted by Google while promoting their browser Chrome, and it shows that many people don't know what a browser is, or they confuse a browser with a search engine. Only a few people answered correctly.



It also seems that Google is determined to educate people on what a browser is. The latest post on the Official Google Blog has a quick comparison showing that people spend way more time on the web than they spend in their car. However, they are more likely to know which car they are driving than to know which browser they are using.

The author of that post, Jason Toff, created a small video clip explaining what a browser is. It is intended for those who know almost nothing about the computer's technical terms. Take a look:



In addition, Toff has also created a simple site, WhatBrowser.org, that gives even more information about browsers. On this site, you can see which web browser you're using, explore links to browser diagnostic tests and read some useful tips for getting the most out of your browser.

So, do you know which browser you're using?

Embed YouTube Videos in PowerPoint for Publishing on the Web

Embed YouTube Videos in PowerPoint for Publishing on the Web

There are basically two ways by which we can embed YouTube clips in PowerPoint presentations:

Option A: You download the YouTube video as an FLV file, convert the video to a format that PowerPoint can understand (e.g. AVI or WMV) and then use the “Insert Movie” command to embed that clip anywhere in the presentation.

Option B: Or you can add a Shockwave Flash object to your PowerPoint slide and set the Movie property of that control to the URL of the YouTube video. For detailed instructions, please refer to the following tutorials:

• How to Insert Flash Movies in PowerPoint


• How to Insert YouTube videos in PowerPoint

The first option is preferred when you want to play videos in offline mode while the next option is useful if you want to embed streaming videos in your PowerPoint slides.

The only problem (or limitation) with either techniques is that once you upload the PowerPoint deck on to the web, the embedded YouTube clips would no longer play as most PowerPoint hosting sites don’t recognize Flash objects.

Well, not anymore. Author Stream, a SlideShare like PowerPoint sharing site, has released an Office plug-in that lets you embed YouTube videos in PPT slides but the the more interesting part is that when you upload this deck to the web, the YouTube videos aren’t lost.

Once installed, the plug-in will add a new option in the PowerPoint ribbon from where you can search for video clips on YouTube or, if you are looking to embed any particular video, just copy-paste the YouTube URL into the add-in as in this screenshot.

In addition to YouTube videos, the add-in also lets you search and insert pictures from Bing Image Search into PowerPoint slides but there’s no way for you to attribute images or limit your image search to Creative Commons content.

Offisync is another add-in that brings Google Images into PowerPoint.

Once you are done adding videos to PowerPoint, you can either play them as a local slideshow or upload these slides to the Author Stream website (using the plug-in itself) and you will then be able to embed the presentation into your website or share it over the Internet - see example.

Internally, the Author Stream plug-in too uses the Shockwave Flash object technique to embed YouTube videos in slides but it’s integrated with YouTube search as well and that alone makes this add-on a very useful one.

Now Slideshare too allows users to embed YouTube videos into PowerPoint slides but that can only be done once the PPT or PDF files has been uploaded onto the SlideShare website. In case of Author Stream, you can insert video at the deck design stage itself and you have full control over the size and place of the YouTube clip in the slide.

YouTube clips embedded through Slideshare always occupy the whole slide and there’s no option to add text or images in the slide that contains video but it’s still a very useful option for people who don’t have Windows and PowerPoint 2007.