Over a billion videos on YouTube are accessible to viewers who are hard of hearing or completely deaf, thanks to the video platform’s automated captions . YouTube product manager Liat Kaver has announced the milestone number in a blog post, where he also talked about how hard it was growing up as a kid who’s hard of hearing and having very little access to closed captions. After his team launched automated captions in 2009, they started concentrating on making it more available and improving its accuracy. Kaver said they made automated captions more available to YouTubers by combining Google’s automatic speech recognition technology with the YouTube caption system. They then achieved a 50 percent leap in accuracy — for English captions, at least — by improving the service’s machine learning algorithms and expanding its training data. We all know how funny caption fails can be, but people who have no other way of knowing what was actually said would end up missing bits of information. In the image above, you’ll see an example comparing the service’s old (left) and current (right) models. Going forward, the company aims to improve the accuracy of the 10 other languages its caption tech supports. Kaver is encouraging YouTube creators to chip in and review the accuracy of machine-generated captions for their videos, as well. After all, the more data they have on their hands, the easier it’ll be to improve the technology. Source: YouTube
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YouTube now has over one billion auto-captioned videos
According to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “The ruling comes a little over two months after a high-profile court hearing, during which MIT and University of California, Berkeley heatedly argued about who should own CRISPR, ” The Verge reports. From their report: STAT News reported that the decision was one sentence long. The three judges decided that the Broad patents are different enough from the ones the University of California applied for that the Broad patents stand. The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn’t so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn’t how the science world views her work, STAT points out: “Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500, 000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450, 000 Japan Prize in 2017, ” the outlet notes. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
