Taking the drive to make YouTube better and more user friendly, Google has announced that it will now be adding a new technology to its video website which will enable automatic text captions' addition to videos played, via speech recognition.

YouTube had enabled manual captions addition about a year back, and users have been trying to make use of this offering, although finding it a little cumbersome. Currently, users who want to add captions to videos need to pen down the full transcript of the content and then time it very carefully to match the actions in the video. The effort and expense required for manual caption adding has greatly limited the use of captions on YouTube to huge broadcasters who upload only licensed shows.

Making things easier for users, now Google will make use of the same voice recognition used in Google Voice and give them the option of inserting automatic captions to videos generated by a machine. Google is hoping that not only will the new development help people who have impaired hearing, but, as confirmed by the company, "allow people across the world to access video content in any of 51 languages".

To begin with, Google is applying the text caption option to only a few YouTube channels, warning that results could be a little "spotty" at first. The channels which will first gain access to the new technology are the ones focusing on education. The auto-caption feature will soon be expanded to other channels and languages, Google has promised.