Google announced that YouTube is turning on its auto-captioning technology to all users, a move it hopes will make videos both easier to watch and find in its search engine. This move benefits not only deaf users, but also people who watch videos in really noisy places, like airport terminals.

Video providers are now able to apply for machine transcription on their own videos. For those videos that have not been transcribed yet, a user can request it themselves. YouTube then puts it in a transcription queue. Google is trying to make as fast as possible but this may take anywhere from an hour to a day.

Auto-captioning borrows some text-to-speech algorithms from Google Voice Search to automatically create captions upon viewer request. But like any other machine-generated captioning, the outcome isn’t flawless, but they’re fairly accurate for formal presentations and keynote-type speeches with minimal background noise. Auto-captioning may give you a pretty good idea of what’s being said, although some of the finer points may be misleading or or totally wrong.