Today, Google announced a new video captioning option for YouTube. Starting today, YouTube will use Google’s automatic speech recognition technology to caption videos uploaded by users. Initially the service will only be available to a select group of YouTube users. That group includes organizations like PBS and National Geographic. And for now the auto captioning will only be in English.

Although auto captioning isn’t available to everyone yet, there is a new captioning option that is available to all YouTube users. YouTube has added an automatic caption timing option which should make it much easier to caption your videos. Using the auto-timing option users will be able to upload a text document of the captions they want to use and the captions will be placed appropriately by using Google’s automatic speech recognition technology.

The video below shows you how the new auto caption options should work.

Applications for Education
When it becomes available to everyone, YouTube’s automatic captioning service will be a great help to anyone that needs to provide subtitled videos to their students.

DotSub and Caption Tube also offer good options for subtitling videos in any language. You can read about those options here.