In a noteworthy Thursday announcement, Internet search biggie Google said that, beginning this week, it will launch a singular service that will add automatic, machine-generated captions for YouTube videos.

The new service will facilitate the accessibility of the online videos to the deaf and the hearing-impaired; as well as help people across the globe access video content in 51 languages. In addition, the extensive rollout of captions will further enhance YouTube’s search functionality, and enable users to easily search any particular part of a video.

Despite the fact that Google’s present captioning service already allows the addition of manually-created caption tracks for thousands of videos on Google sites, most videos still end up lacking captions as the service fails to cope up with the nearly 20 hours of video that is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Hence, to make the insertion of captions an automatic, machine-generated feature of all YouTube videos, Google has decided to tap into the speech-recognition technology that it is being used by the Google Voice call management service.

However, the launch of the automatic caption service will be a phased one; initially applicable to a handful of channels that focus on education. About the rather cautious launch, Ken Harrenstien, YouTube’s software engineer, said: “We want to make sure we get feedback both from viewers and video owners before we roll them out more broadly.”