YouTube adds automatic subtitles to online videos

YouTube has started adding automatic subtitles to its English-language videos. Although it’s set to be a time-consuming process, Google is improving its voice-recognition system to make the auto-captioning function available to millions of people worldwide suffering from a hearing impairment, therefore improving accessibility of the site’s content.

'Captions can make [it] easier for users to discover content on YouTube. Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater collaboration and understanding'. Hiroto Tokusei, Product Manager, YouTube.

The automatic subtitles can also be downloaded, edited and updated by the video’s owner if necessary.

Here’s one of the first videos available with auto-captions:

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