New technologies are making quite some noise in the language world these days. After Google and its automatic phone translation, France24 innovates and offers an automatic live transcript of every single word on its Internet videoplayer. Its objectives are mainly to improve SEO, accessibility to deaf people and language learning. It is not perfect yet (it works only in French), but it’s still an amazing achievement.

Same idea, different website: YouTube (property of… Google) also offers an « auto-captioning » service for millions of English videos. And without a doubt, it will also translate all the content in the near future. I tried it with the latest speech of Barack Obama, and the result is pretty amazing.