"One of the big challenges of the video medium is whether it can be made accessible to everyone," said Cerf, who also holds the title of "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google.

Speaking at Google's Washington office, Cerf noted that he has a "great personal interest" in the closed caption capability. Cerf, 66, is hearing impaired and has been wearing hearing aids since the age of 13.

Since last year, YouTube users have been able to manually add captions to videos but the feature is not widely used and most content on the site does not have captions.

Noting that over 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Ken Harrenstien, a deaf Google software engineer who led the caption project, said "the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me."

Google uses Automatic Speech Recognition technology to generate captions and Harrenstien noted that it is not perfect -- the word "sim card," for example, came out as "salmon" during one demonstration.

Google audio engineers said background noise and strong accents pose a challenge to creating precise captions from the spoken word, but Harrenstien said the technology "will continue to improve with time."

"Today I'm more hopeful than ever that we'll achieve our long-term goal of making videos universally accessible," he said in a blog post. "Even with its flaws, I see the addition of automatic captioning as a huge step forward."

Although the automatic captions can only be generated from videos in English for the moment, they can be simultaneously machine-translated into any of the 51 languages Google supports.

In addition to the automatic captions, Google announced a new feature that will make it easier for users to add captions to their videos.

Called automatic caption timing, it involves creating a text transcript of the video and uploading it to YouTube. Speech recognition technology is then used to create and synchronize captions for the video.

"This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don't have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks," Harrenstien said.

Both features will be available in English by the end of the week.

The university partners whose videos will allow automatic captioning include the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, Columbia University, Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Yale and the University of New South Wales in Australia.

National Geographic's YouTube channel will also include the feature, as will most of Google and YouTube's own channels.

Thursday's event was attended by representatives of Gallaudet University, the largest US university for the deaf, as well as the National Association of the Deaf, the American Association of People with Disabilities and other groups.

With so much attention focused on adding new stuff, you've got to wonder what the future has in store for search and whether this feature war is getting out of hand.

The Battle for Search

It's nothing new to try and suck the life out of a competitor's product by making a competing major announcement around the same time. Palm and Sprint tried to do that to Apple with the launch of the Palm Pre. Not to mention that Google Wave launched on May 28, the same day that Bing made its debut. But lately, the battle between Google and Bing is getting to be like a tennis match that never ends, just a constant rally back and forth as each side tries to outmaneuver the other.

Look at Wednesday: Bing announces some interesting new features that integrate the computational power of Wolfram Alpha into its search results. As an added bonus, Bing gets limited Facebook integration and tweaks its weather results.

How does Google respond? An announcement about tweaked movie searches, and password protection for your SafeSearch settings--Google's filter for explicit content. Improved SafeSearch is worth talking about and likely a welcome improvement, but the Google Movies announcement looks like a desperate plea to prove that Google can be just as consumer oriented as Bing.

The Future

Although competing announcements can get a little tiring, there's a lot to love about the heavy competition in the search market. Google and Microsoft realize that search is where the online money is, which is why they spend so much time on new features and products that will keep you coming back for more. Increased competition could lead to helpful technologies emerging like improved semantic search, hyper local features, voice activated search on your PC and who know what else?

It's an exciting future for search--I can't believe I just said that--and Google and Bing are working hard to deliver the latest and greatest features to their loyal users. I just hope they don't lose focus on basic things like filtering search spam and phishing detection in the rush to deliver new features before the other guy does.

taken from: tech.yahoo.com

As soon as those regulators give approval, the agreement goes into effect worldwide, although implementation in a specific country would be postponed if regulatory approval is required but not yet obtained. That should not postpone implementation in other places, a Microsoft spokesman said.

Microsoft believes the deal will close in early 2010, and that they can make significant progress on integration in one or two major markets next year.