YouTube will offer CC on your videos now!!!

This just came in!

Google Inc.'s YouTube said it will offer automatically generated captions for its entire video catalog, a boon for deaf users and those who want to watch videos in other languages.

At a press conference at YouTube's San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, Google software engineer Ken Harrenstein demonstrated the feature and went through the reasons Google invested in the product—from expanding accessibility to crossing language barriers to improving search.

YouTube watchers can see available captions by clicking on a button in the lower-right-hand part of the video player. They can also select to see captions in a different language from the language of the video. Mr. Harrenstein, who is deaf and gave his presentation in sign language, said he has been working on the product for the past five years.

YouTube has been pushing captions for a while, in part because the company hopes it will make it easier for its search engine to identify particular moments within a video. In 2008, it began allowing content owners to upload their own captions. Last year, Google turned on automatic captioning for videos uploaded by a small number of partners, like the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University.

Now, YouTube is rolling them out across the catalog of millions of videos, starting with English-language videos, as long as they have clear audio. The move was cheered by several students from the California School for the Deaf, who were in attendance.

Google research scientist Mike Cohen said the captioning technology blends Google's speech-recognition and translation algorithms. "I don't know about anything tried at this type of scale before," he said.

Mr. Cohen said the technology is constantly improving, getting better at canceling out noise conditions and factoring accents.

He said it relies on the same technology components as Google's other speech-recognition products, like Google Voice's automatic voice-mail transcription and its voice-based search service. But he noted that the algorithms have to be tweaked to account for the differences in audio spoken into a phone versus an audio track.

The technology isn't perfect. Mr. Harrenstein pulled up captions for a video of Google executive Vic Gundotra at a Google developer conference last year.

While talking about giving each developer in attendance an Android phone, Mr. Gundotra said the phones contained a SIM card, which provides service for the phone. The technology picked it up as "salmon."

Mr. Harrenstein said, aside from the captions for millions of videos already running, Google will have the rest of the library done soon.

YouTube viewers will be able to select to see captions automatically, although some companies that upload large amounts of content to YouTube will get to choose whether they want captions available.

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