YouTube Introduces Auto Livestream Captions For All Creators

YouTube has announced on Thursday that its automatic Livestream captions will be available for all creators, against being limited to channels with more than 1,000 subscribers like they were during the feature’s initial rollout.

The company detailed in its blog that the changes along with other future improvements are expected to help make the platform more accessible to deaf or hard-of-hearing people.

Some of those updates include making live auto-captions available to 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 audio descriptions for those with limited eyesight), and the expansion of the auto-translate captions feature to support mobile devices, too. The expanded language support for live and auto-translate captions will be coming within the next few months, and YouTube says multiple audio tracks will be more widely available “in the coming quarters.”

YouTube also said that it has plans to carry out an “experiment” with letting users search through video transcripts on mobile devices.

the Subtitle Editor permission is still in process and YouTube has promised to provide updates on its progress“in the coming months.” The feature, which will let creators designate other people to add subtitles to their videos, was meant to replace the community captions feature that YouTube removed.