The second major part of that announcement was a very powerful set of captioning tools that will make captioning much easier. For example, you can upload the script of the video, and Google will automatically sync the captions to the audio. (Using speech analysis with a script is much more precise than without). Or, you can go ahead and let Google do it’s best guess at writing the captions itself, and then go in and fix errors – obviously, both of these are preferable to the current situation.

It’s really really exciting. I honestly didn’t expect that the captioning problem would ever get a satisfactory solution, so seeing Google announce these free tools is just amazing. I expect that we will very soon see much larger percantages of videos with captions than ever before, and with better captions than ever before.