Automated captioning for voice tweets are now available on Twitter. The app is now only available for iOS users and is geared primarily at supporting people with disabilities. The technology has been in development since last year, but it is now being made available to a wider audience. English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean, and Italian will all be supported by the automated captions.
By tapping the CC button in the right-hand corner of the voice tweet window, Twitter users can launch captions. Voice tweets can be added to standard text to offer context or to help visually impaired people view the tweet more clearly. However the new tool will however only apply to new voice tweets.
Users can access and recognise voice tweets because they display as audio clips. The person who is sharing the voice tweet will see it appear in the background and can listen to it by tapping the play button. Last year, Twitter established two dedicated teams, the Accessibility Center of Excellence and the Experience Accessibility Team, to focus exclusively on Twitter’s features and products.
While launching the service, Twitter stated, “Transcription for audio and video is part of our bigger commitment to make Twitter accessible for everyone across all features, both existing and new.” “We listened to your suggestions and are working on it. Captions for voice Tweets are being rolled out today to boost accessibility features. Captions will now automatically generate and appear when you record a voice Tweet. Click the “CC” button to see the captions on the web,” Twitter said last week.
Twitter has also stated that its new feature Fleets will be phased out on August 3 in favour of Spaces, the Clubhouse-style audio sessions. “We believed Fleets would make it easier for more individuals to join the discourse on Twitter,” Ilya Brown, Twitter’s vice president of product, said in a statement. “However, we haven’t seen the boost in the number of new people entering the Fleets conversation that we had hoped for in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone.”
