In a bid to make its site more accessible for visitors who are deaf or hard of hearing, YouTube is adding automatic captions to tens of millions of videos.
The project will initially apply to videos featuring spoken English before being rolled out to other languages over the forth coming months.
BBC News reported that YouTube are hoping to "democratise information and help foster greater collaboration and understanding" by making video content more readily available for viewers of different abilities.
Speech recognition technology
The captioning process - which relies on speech recognition technology - hasn't been without its glitches though and YouTube have stressed that the new feature is very much an ongoing project.
Bloggers around the world have been quick to pick up on the feature's more comical misquotations; the word 'sim card' being mistaken for 'salmon' being one example that appears in a video of a Google developers meeting.
So far however the reaction to YouTube's automatic video captioning has been positive.
BBC News quoted Angel Harrington - a student from the California School for the Deaf - and her reaction to the automatic captioning: "We felt like we weren't part of the world. We felt excluded. Now we really can completely understand what is going on and we feel like we are on an equal playing field."
Good read?
You can follow QueryClick on Twitter...
Follow @queryclick
Want to get the new posts in your inbox?
Get a monthly digest (as well as free search engine marketing tips and guides)
Comments