YouTube says its auto livestream captions are now available to all creators

 

                           

 YouTube has announced that its automated livestream captions should now be available to all creators, instead of being limited to channels with more than 1,000 subscribers, as they were during the feature’s initial rollout. This change, along with some future improvements, details in the company’s blog, should help make the platform more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Some of those updates include making Live Auto Caption available in 12 more languages ​​instead of just English (including Japanese, Turkish and Spanish), the ability to add multiple audio tracks to a video to support multiple languages ​​(and for a limited number of people). audio description for vision), and also the expansion of the auto-translate caption feature to support mobile devices. Expanded language support for live and auto-translate captions will arrive over the next few months, and YouTube says many audio tracks will be more widely available “in the coming quarters.”

Auto-translate captions and searchable transcripts are also features that made their way from desktop to mobile.

YouTube also says it will “use” users to search through video transcripts on mobile devices. For me, it’s been an extremely useful feature on the desktop – clicking the three dot icon to the right of the like/dislike bar, then hitting “open transcript” to get the full searchable text of the video took me countless hours Have been saved, so it’s nice to see it come to mobile too.

YouTube hasn’t released a replacement for Community Captions yet

Lastly, YouTube says it’s still working on a subtitle editor’s permission, and it will provide updates on its progress “over the coming months.” The feature, which would let creators designate other people to add subtitles to their videos, was meant to replace the Community Captions feature that YouTube removed. Without relying on volunteers for captions and translation, producers who wanted to make their videos more accessible had to scramble to build their own system.