Twitter Made Auto-Captions for Voice Tweets

  • Sam Delton
  • 18 Jul 2021
Twitter Made Auto-Captions for Voice Tweets

On Thursday, social network Twitter officially announced that auto-generated captions will be added to voice tweets. The feature of voice tweets was originally announced more than a year ago, in June 2020. Now that Twitter has rolled out this function, the subtitles will be automatically generated when you make a voice tweet. The languages supported are English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, and Indonesian. However, you should remember that this feature is only available on iOS, like all voice tweets in general.

For the captions of a particular tweet to appear, you’ll have to tap or click on the “CC” button. You can find it in the upper right corner of the tweet window. According to Twitter, they will be available only on the new tweets. Thus you won’t be able to see them in some older voice tweets. Last June, when the voice tweets were launched, they were extremely criticized for the lack of subtitles required by United States federal law. Many accessibility advocates claimed that it is important for such companies to think about their inclusive design from the very start.

It was later revealed that the company didn’t have an accessibility team at all. So some employees volunteered to devote their time to provide these functions. Since then, the company has fixed the problem: several accessibility teams were successfully formed in September.

The feature is yet to be improved and worked on. According to Gurpreet Kaur, the Head of the global accessibility team, it is too early to judge this new function, and it might not work perfectly at first. However, this is definitely an extremely important step in the process of expanding and improving the accessibility of their service.