With the aim of making YouTube more user friendly, Google announced on Thursday that the company would be adding automatic, machine generated text captions for all the videos. The new service will be launched within this week, with only a handful of videos getting captions to begin with, and is looking to make the site more accessible for users who have impaired hearing.

There are many videos on YouTube which feature texts and captions, but these have been added by users manually, a process which is a little cumbersome. There are an estimated 20 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, and considering this, there are still many, many videos which lack captions. So the company is making the most of the speech recognition technology, which is already used in Google Voice, to make captions an automatic feature on YouTube.

The new technology has been conceived and developed by Ken Harrenstien, Google's software engineer who is deaf, and he has dedicated a post to it in the company's official blog. "The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me", he wrote, while asserting that things will now be easier for many people out there who have hearing problems.

Google has been quick to acknowledge that, to begin with, the captions might not be perfect, as the technology needs to be refined, and are therefore being introduced to few videos. But it will be expanded over time to include all YouTube videos.