A noticed a new button had popped up when watching some of my own YouTube videos this evening…Interactive Transcript (highlighted in yellow in the screen shot below).

Clicking the Interactive Transcript button opens up a timecode synced transcript of the video you are watching. YouTube has been offering automatically generated captions for quite a while now, but this lays out the automated transcripts in such a way that the user can click on individual lines to just to that part of the video automatically. Machine transcription is far from 100% accurate, but with good audio Google’s algorithm can do quite well.

Thus bodes well for making video and audio searchable in Google’s index, something that is not really possible today. I would assume though that since they are creating these transcripts anyway, it won’t be a far step to slurping these transcripts into the Google indexing system so that people can find videos simply by searching on word used in the video. One missing feature is an easy way to export the transcript, even from your own videos, so that you could share it on your own web site along with the video.

Let me know if you are seeing the Interactive Transcript button on your videos. Google often rolls out tests to random users in order to judge the popularity and effectivness of new features, so it might not be available for everyone.

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