YouTube automatic captions now in six European languages

Captions are important to make sure everyone—including deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages—can enjoy videos on YouTube.

In 2009, you first saw a feature that automatically creates captions on YouTube videos in English, and since then we’ve added Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Today, hundreds of millions of people speaking six more languages—German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch—will have automatic caption support for YouTube videos in those languages. Just click the closed caption button on any of these videos to see how it works:



Now in 10 languages, automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute. As automatic captions will have some errors, creators also have several tools to improve the quality of their captions. Automatic captions can be a starting point, where creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. Creators can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronized captions.

You now have around 200 million videos with automatic and human-created captions on YouTube, and we continue to add more each day to make YouTube accessible for all.

Hoang Nguyen, software engineer, recently watched “Completo, ilha das flores.”