

Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages.

This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I'm deaf. Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we've introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation.
