YouTube, which boasted over a trillion views in 2011, announced yesterday that it now offers automatic captions in six European languages - German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch. The video-sharing website first introduced automatic captions in English back in 2009. Since then, it has also added captions for Japanese, Korean and Spanish.
The company's Auto Captions technology, which is used here, works on the same voice recognition algorithms used within Google Voice. But like any other voice recognition software out there, this one is not error free. Users will come by errors depending on the complexity of the dialogues being translated, but this small setback shouldn't stop the feature from being extremely useful. It makes sure that deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages can enjoy the plethora of videos on offer.
Users can also download these captions, edit them and perfect the captions or even edit them in-line. YouTube also allows users to upload plain text transcripts in these languages, allowing the technology to generate automatically-synchronized captions.
Currently, the company claims to have around 200 million videos with automatic and human created captions.
Over the years, Google has packed many different features into its video sharing website to make it stand out from the crowd. The Auto Captions function is just one of many of those unique offerings that make YouTube the most popular video sharing destination on the internet.
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May 01, 2026 15:54 ET Central banks dominated the economics news flow this week with almost all major ones announcing their latest policy decisions and many boosted expectations for a rate hike in June. In other news, several countries released the preliminary data for first quarter economic growth. In the U.S., comments by Fed Chair Jerome Powell were also in focus as his term ends this month.