Until now, Spaces and voice tweets were the only Twitter products to support auto captions.
What you need to know
- Twitter has started rolling out automatic captions for videos on its platform.
- In addition to Android and iOS devices, the feature will also be available on the web.
- For now, however, there’s no way for users to report inaccurate captions.
Twitter has finally started pushing automatic captions for videos, making its platform more accessible. As confirmed by the official Twitter Support handle, video captions are now available on the best Android phones and iPhones.
Twitter says auto-captions will appear in the language of the device that was used to upload the video. Disappointingly, though, translation isn’t available yet.
It is important to note that video captions will only appear automatically on new videos uploaded to Twitter. You won’t see them on old videos that don’t have captions. While auto-captions will appear by default on muted videos on Twitter’s mobile app, you’ll have to use the “CC” button to turn captions on or off on the web.
Where are video captions when you need them? They’re here now automatically on videos uploaded starting today.Android & iOS: auto-captions will show on muted Tweet videos; keep them on when unmuted via your device’s accessibility settingsWeb: use the “CC” button to turn on/off pic.twitter.com/IHJAI31IvX
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 14, 2021
On iOS and Android, captions will be shown automatically when you view videos in your timeline. If you want to see captions in full screen, you’ll have to enable captions at the system level by heading over to your phone’s accessibility settings. Auto-captions are currently available in 30 languages — including French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.
The announcement comes a week after Twitter began testing a TikTok-like vertical feed called “Explore.” Twitter believes the feature will help its users discover “the best content that’s trending.” The new Explore tab is only available in a few countries right now for people who use Twitter in English.
Voice tweets on Twitter were the first to get caption support. While voice tweets were launched last year, Twitter added captions to the product only in July this year. Twitter also added live captions to its Clubhouse rival Spaces earlier this year.