If you’re tired of having to wait for a live stream to end before watching it with captions, YouTube’s latest announcement has some good news for you. The platform’s automatic captions feature is now available to all creators on the forum, including those who didn’t meet the platform’s previous subscriber requirement.
Automatic captions are available on most YouTube videos, but there is one caveat: they are only available on previously published videos, not live ones. This makes it more difficult for viewers with hearing loss or deafness to enjoy live-streamed content. YouTube began responding to this by implementing automatic captions on live streams.
Some creators have already been given access to the feature, but YouTube has limited it to channels with 1,000 subscribers. That has changed, and now all creators on the platform, including those with fewer than 1,000 subscribers, can enable the feature for their live streams.
The live auto-captions are only available on English-language live streams, but they are still a significant improvement for users who require accessibility features. YouTube has announced that it will expand the automatic live captioning feature to all live streams that use one of the 13 auto-captioning languages it supports.
Automatic live captioning is a simple toggle switch under the “closed captions” menu that creators can enable in YouTube Studio. YouTube also announced that automatic caption translations would be available on iOS and Android later this year.
Source: slashgear
