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How did one Google intern spend his summer? Cooking up a new feature for YouTube users.

In a "Diary of a Summer Intern" blog posted yesterday, Rio Akasaka described the feature for editing video captions. Instead of creating a brand new caption for your YouTube videos, you can now simply change the existing caption online.

As an intern, Akasaka had help from a mentor, but he apparently played a leading role in designing the new feature. And as an associate product manager, he was responsible in large part for the project's outcome.

"My project required me … Read more

I'd Cap That+ is the paid follow-up to the wildly popular, free caption-generating app I'd Cap That. For 99 cents, "+" offers the same crude humor of its predecessor, but adds a few features that many felt the original were missing.

Like its free counterpart, I'd Cap That+ is a novelty app that automatically generates hilarious, sometimes crude captions for your iPhone photos. Just fire it up, choose to either take a new photo or use an existing photo from your phone's gallery, and hit Use. After that, watch I'd Cap That slap a … Read more

I'd Cap That is a novelty app that automatically generates hilarious, sometimes crude captions for your iPhone photos. Just fire it up, choose to either take a new photo or use an existing photo from your phone's gallery, and hit Use. After that, watch I'd Cap That slap a completely ridiculous and possibly humiliating caption under your mug (or your friend's). Most of the captions generated are pretty good at getting laughs, and many of them might even get shudders. See, the app often uses explicit and/or sexual language in its captions, so it comes … Read more

Halftone turns your photographs into captioned comics with a distinctive worn-paper style. Start by snapping a new photo with your iPhone camera or by selecting an image from your photo library. From there, you can use the buttons on the bottom of the interface to select from 27 different paper styles to give your final product that heavily dogeared comic look. You also can add customizable speech balloons and choose from a few different layouts, but we think there should be more layout options--especially multipane formats. For a little more excitement, you can pick from 24 exclamation balloons (Arrrgh! BLAM!) … Read more

YouTube captions help to make the service accessible to all types of users. With that in mind, if you want to add auto-captioning (based on speech) to every video you load, you can. Or if you want to disable all types of captioning, you can do that too. Follow these quick steps to find out how to get to these settings:

Step 1: Log in to YouTube so you can access your personal settings.

Step 2: Click your username in the top right to open a small menu, and then choose Settings.

Step 3: Choose "Playback Setup" from … Read more

Netflix has been sued by the National Association of the Deaf for failing to offer closed-captioning on enough of its streaming content.

In a lawsuit (PDF) filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the district of Massachusetts, the NAD alleges that Netflix is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing captions for most of its "Watch Instantly" streamed movies and TV shows.

Pointing to the approximately 36 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing, the National Association of the Deaf says that it and members of the deaf community have already … Read more

On Thursday Google announced that YouTube is turning on its auto-captioning technology to all users--a move it hopes will make videos both easier to watch and find in its search engine.

The company is trying to make the service more accessible to everyone. At a press conference at YouTube's San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, the company touted the feature as useful to not only viewers who are hearing-impaired but also to people who are learning English as a second language.

Video providers are now able to apply for machine transcription on their own videos. And for videos that have not … Read more

Business professionals who spend a substantial amount of time behind the wheel will find a helpful dictation secretary in MyCaption. A simple interface mirrors the application's ease of use. Click to record an e-mail up to 3 minutes in length, or a memo, task, or calendar item. You can opt to review the e-mail message before sending it out. MyCaption then uploads the content to secure, Amazon-hosted servers, where it's transcribed using a combination of machine-based speech recognition and human transcription, and rerouted.

Thanks to human interception during lengthy dictation, e-mails were accurate during our tests. More complex … Read more

It seems like just about everyone has a Twitter or Facebook account these days and I find myself checking the so called "status updates" for my friends and family more than I'd like to admit. I never thought when these services launched that a status update could become anything more than a simple yawn-worthy report of personal activity. But as we've seen with these services' growing popularity, and the recent explosion of activity during the aftermath of Iran's election, the idea of a status update has morphed into something much bigger. A simple sentence or … Read more