Creating captions for your videos on YouTube becomes much easier today, thanks to automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology.

These machine-generated automatic captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for.

Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has been combined with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.

In addition to automatic captions, Gogle is also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we?ll use Google?s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don?t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.

Both features will available in English by the end of the week. For the initial launch, auto-caps are only visible on a handful of Google's partner channels. Auto-timing, on the other hand, is rolling out globally for all English-language videos on YouTube.