Twitter Adds New Feature to Caption Voice Tweets Automatically

2 min readJul 18, 2021

Twitter posted a voice tweets feature over a year ago and it’s soaking up a lot of heat due to its lack of accessibility features. Now it finally launches the auto-generated subtitles that appear when you click the “CC” button. This new feature is only available for iOS as voice tweets have not arrived on Android yet.

The inscriptions are in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean and Italian. They will only appear in new voice tweets because they need to be created when the tweet is created, Twitter told The Verge.

Credit: Twitter

When voice tweets were first tested last June, critics were quick to point out that they should have subtitles in the first place, as required by US federal law.

Twitter later acknowledged that there was no dedicated accessibility team. Twitter relied on employees to devote extra time to these functions. Since then, however, the company has created a team dedicated to accessibility.

The company initially promised to add auto-labeling in early 2021, but that date seems to have been pushed back a bit.

Twitter has assured that he will improve his services and also expands its products market. “While this is still early days and we know it won’t be perfect at first. This is one of many steps we are taking to expand and strengthen the accessibility of our services. We look forward to continuing our journey of truly inclusive services. said Gurpreet Kaur, director of global accessibility at Twitter.

This new subtitle feature comes in handy after TikTok released automatic video subtitles in April as part of a broader strategy. It will help to make the platform more inclusive for deaf or deaf users.

Instagram announced that it has been working on subtitles for Stories since May. In September 2020, Twitter said it hoped to provide audio transcriptions in early 2021 by forming two new teams to work on platform integration and accessibility.

“As part of our ongoing work to make Twitter accessible to everyone. We are introducing automated voice tweeting for iOS,” said Gurpreet Kaur, head of global availability for Twitter, in a statement.

“While it’s still early days and we know it won’t be perfect at first. This is one of many steps we’re taking to expand and strengthen the accessibility of our services. We look forward to continuing our journey of truly inclusive services. — added Garprey.

Currently, the new subtitle feature is only available for iOS users. It is currently unknown when it will available for Android users. If you want to see the subtitles of a tweet, you need to tap on the CC icon located in the upper right corner of the voicemail window.

The cited source notes that subtitles only appear on new voice tweets. It generally means that not all old tweets contain subtitles. The company’s microblogging site also offers subtitles for Twitter Spaces.

Published in Lahore Herald #TwitterVoiceFeature, #TwitterVoiceTweetsFeature Published in Lahore Herald

Written by Lahore Herald