While YouTube has offered captioning for a few years, its parent company, Google, announced Thursday that they’re making it significantly easier for publishers to add captions to their videos.

YouTube can now automatically assign captions to video using speech recognition.

Video publishers can now upload a transcript for their videos, which further helps the site add accurate captioning. Users can translate these captions into multiple languages too when watching videos.

How does this new feature work? Google explains in their blog:

We've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

In addition to automatic captions, we're also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video.

Watch a demo video of the new captioning tool:

Google YouTube