~ MamakTalk ~: Twitter Finally Pushes Auto Captions For Voice Tweets

2021年7月17日星期六

Twitter Finally Pushes Auto Captions For Voice Tweets

In an official tweet, Twitter is finally pushing the automatic captions for voice tweets. Notably, voice tweets were introduced back in June 2020 but were criticized for lack of accessibility features.

The most prominent feature that was missing was not having captions. Thankfully, Twitter has realized its importance and is pushing the auto-captions feature for voice tweets.

Twitter auto-captions will appear when you press the “CC” button. Sadly though, this new feature is currently only available for iOS devices. Because voice tweets are yet to arrive on the Android app.

Now, when you make a voice tweet, captions will be automatically generated in multiple languages. The Twitter auto-caption feature supports English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean, and Italian languages.

The “CC” icon will be located on the top-right corner of the voice tweet window. Twitter told The Verge, that the auto-captions feature will only work on new voice tweets.

Auto-captions will not appear for older voice tweets

Twitter auto-captions will not appear for older voice tweets. Voice tweets were criticized immediately because of the missing auto-caption feature, as required by the US Federal Law.

Twitter was quick to cover up and admitted that it doesn’t have a dedicated accessibility team to work on additional features. Back then, they said it relied on the company’s employees to donate time on such features.

After that, Twitter launched a dedicated team to work on all the accessibility features for the micro-blogging website. Later, it promised to bring auto-captions in early 2021, which, of course, did not happen.

Finally, after much delay, auto-captions are here, although, for iOS users, for now. Twitter has also promised to expand the services across its products.

Moreover, Twitter’s head of global accessibility Gurpreet Kaur said in a statement that the auto-captions feature for voice tweets is still under development and in its early stages.

So, everything won’t be perfect at first. Twitter will continue to strengthen and improve its functionality over time. There is no information on when Twitter plans to bring the voice tweets feature, let alone auto-captions for Android users.

FYI, Twitter also offers captions for Twitter Space, which is a Clubhouse like social audio-room platform. Besides, Twitter also announced to shut down its year-old feature, Fleets, earlier this week.

The micro-blogging company feels “Fleets” does not have any future and the service will come to an end on August 3, 2021.

We took your feedback and we’re doing the work. To improve accessibility features, captions for voice Tweets are rolling out today.

Now when you record a voice Tweet, captions will automatically generate and appear. To view the captions on web, click the “CC” button. https://t.co/hrdI19Itu6 pic.twitter.com/pDlpOUgV6l

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 15, 2021