YouTube Expands Automatic Captions for Live Streams and Adds New Captioning Options

YouTube has made some improvements to its video captioning tools, making it easier for more channels to add caption text to their videos.

To begin with, YouTube has announced that automated captioning for live-streams in English are now open to all creators.

Automatic captions were previously only available to channels with more than 1,000 subscribers, and even then, they were limited. YouTube is now allowing all streamers to use the feature, providing content creators more options for making their work more accessible.

You may enable live automatic captioning within YouTube Studio's Stream Settings.

This will give your streams a new aspect, allowing you to engage with a wider range of audiences and viewers. YouTube also mentions that it will be adding more automatic caption languages in the future.

YouTube is also bringing subtitle translation to mobile devices.

Users can currently translate accessible caption tracks into another language on the desktop version of the app.

The mobile app will soon have the same capability, allowing users to consume video in their local language even more easily.

Finally, YouTube has made video transcripts searchable, allowing users to locate specific parts of video clips using the caption text.

According to YouTube:

“In Searchable Transcripts, users can view and search transcripts for information that’s most relevant for them. This allows them to find the most interesting information without watching the entire video.”

This might provide further capability in terms of tracking certain aspects of video and monitoring for significant mentions. In the future, YouTube plans to add the same capability to its mobile app.

These are useful enhancements with functionality that could help with a variety of use cases while also improving accessibility.

More information on YouTube's caption updates may be found here.