Some time ago I posted a description of our website and I mentioned some interesting ways that Google uses its speech recognition.
Last year Google announced automatic captioning or machine transcriptions to transcribe spoken words into text. The captions on the video display as the person is talking but there doesn't seem to be a way to copy the captions from the video if you want to share them somewhere else.
As I was browsing the Google operating system's blog I came across an interesting URL that would let you download captions from an entire video allowing you to see the whole video written down.
This means you could easily get a whole lecture written down from your own video or someone else's.
Step 1 Shoot a video and upload it to YouTube or find a video already captioned on YouTube if you want to do that skip step two.
Step 2 If you've uploaded your own video click on captions on subtitles then click on a acquire machine transcriptions. When that is complete click on the download you could then use the text but it would have time codes in it so I recommend you upload it again by clicking on add new captions or transcripts. Now go straight to step four.
Step 3 If you want to find a video already subtitled on YouTube you should select closed captions under search options when you have searched for videos.
Step 4 Then use this URL: http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=VIDEO_ID and replace the words the VIDEO_ID with the ID of the video you want to download the captions from.
You should then see the entire video written down in front of you. copied the text and go to http://www.nicertutor.com/xml.cgi paste it in and click go now you've got your text!
