On Thursday, YouTube announced that it would soon start automatically captioning most of the videos available on its website, a development which would open up a large amount of content to people who are suffered from impaired hearing, and also come as the very first step in creating a network of videos which can be subtitled between various languages.

Currently, the only videos that YouTube can transcribe are the ones in English into text, and these can then be translated into text captions in other languages.

Keeping in mind the fact that about 20 minutes of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute, the San Bruno unit of Google, the owner of YouTube, has stressed that this would be the "largest effort ever tried on the Internet to harness evolving speech recognition technology to caption video content".

The new service has been cheered by many, including students and teachers at the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, all of who attended the announcement shared on Thursday.