YouTube’s Auto Livestream Captions now Available to all Creators

YouTube has announced that its automatic livestream captions should now be available for all creators, instead of being limited to channels with more than 1,000 subscribers like they were during the feature’s initial rollout. This change, along with some future improvements the company details in its blog, should help make the platform more accessible to deaf or hard-of-hearing people. YouTube also says that it’ll “experiment” with letting users search through video transcripts on mobile devices. 

Live auto-captions are currently only available for livestreams in English, but the company says it plans to expand the feature in the coming months to all 13 supported automatic captioning languages. 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.”

In addition, YouTube says it’ll be rolling out auto-translation for captions in supported languages on Android and iOS later this year. Right now, that feature is only available on desktop. The company also plans to start testing the ability to search caption transcripts on mobile to help users find specific keywords. That’ll also happen later this year. 

YouTube is also testing the ability to add multiple audio tracks in a video, which can help offer multi-language audio for international audiences, in addition to descriptive audio for people who are blind or low-vision. The company says it hopes to “roll this feature out more widely in the coming quarters.”

More tech companies have been adding captions to their platforms as they expand their accessibility efforts. Instagram added automatic captions for IGTV late last year, and then extended that feature to Stories in May. TikTok rolled out automatic captions in April, and Twitter turned on automated captions for voice tweets on iOS following criticism that the feature, which debuted last year, wasn’t accessible to people with disabilities.