YouTube now has more than 1 billion automatically captioned videos

Google has announced today via its YouTube blog that more than 1 billion videos now feature automatic captions, and notes that people watch video with automatic captions “more than 15 million times per day.”

Google first launched video captions back in 2006. Three years later these efforts were taken to a whole new level with automated captions on YouTube. This was a big leap forward to help us keep up with YouTube’s growing scale. Fast forward to today, and the number of videos with automatic captions now exceeds a staggering 1 billion. Moreover, people watch video with automatic captions more than 15 million times per day.

There’s not much else interesting in the announcement post, other than Google noting that it’s constantly working on its automatic speech recognition tech.

“Continuing to improve the accuracy of captions remains an important goal going forward, as does the need to keep growing beyond 1 billion automatic captions,” Google says.

Landmarks in the realm of billions have been common for Google lately, with the Mountain View company recently announcing that it removed over 1.7 billion ‘bad ads’ in 2016, and that YouTube paid out $1 billion in royalties over the last 12 months. Don’t forget Gmail, which passed 1 billion active monthly users last February.