YouTube Live Streaming Auto Captions Are Now Available To All Creators

YouTube has announced that its live-streaming automatic captions should now be available to all creators, rather than being limited to channels with 1,000+ subscribers as they were during the initial launch of the feature. This change, along with some future enhancements the company details on its blog, should help make the platform more accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Some of those updates include making live automatic subtitles 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 audio descriptions for those with limited vision) and the expansion of the automatic subtitle translation feature to support mobile devices as well. Expanded language support for live subtitles and machine translation will arrive in the coming months, and YouTube says that several audio tracks will be more available "in the coming quarters."

YouTube also says it will "experiment" by allowing users to search for video transcripts on mobile devices. For me, this has been an extremely useful feature on the desktop: clicking the three-dot icon to the right of the Like / Dislike bar and then hitting "Open Transcript" to get a full text of the video with Searchability has saved me countless hours, so it's good to see that it could also reach mobile devices.

Finally, YouTube says that it is still working on the Caption Editor permission and will provide updates on its progress "in the coming months." The feature, which will allow creators to designate other people to add captions to their videos, was intended to replace the community captioning feature YouTube removed. Unable to rely on volunteers for subtitles and translations, creators who wanted to make their videos more accessible have struggled to create their own systems.