Twitter is rolling out automatically generated captions for videos

Making it easier to watch videos when you can’t turn on your speakers

Videos are becoming an increasingly popular form of entertainment on social networks, thanks in big part to TikTok and its (initially super-short) looping clips. Other platforms are also looking to make videos easier to consume, whether you’ve got your phone set to silent or not. As such, Twitter has just announced that it’s rolling out support for automatically generated video captions.

The automatic video captions will show up starting today, but it might take some time until they reach your account. They’ll behave pretty similarly to how they do on YouTube. When you scroll through your feed, the automatic captions will show up while videos are auto-played without audio. Once you decide to dive into a clip in full-screen, the captions will disappear, but a toggle will allow you to turn them back on on the web. On Android and iOS, Twitter says that you’ll have to dive into your device’s accessibility settings to do so, which seems unnecessarily cumbersome.

In a reply to a Twitter user, the company further confirmed that auto captions will initially only appear in the language the video was uploaded in. Translations might come to the platform at a later date, though, with Twitter saying that “Translation isn’t available just yet.”

If you don’t want to wait for Twitter to activate automatically generated captions for you, you could also try out Android’s built-in accessibility tool. Live Caption is available on many Android phones and can usually be found right under your system volume slider when you hit your device’s volume rocker.

While the feature will make it much easier to gauge if a video is interesting to watch, it will also help millions of hard-of-hearing and deaf users around the world to enjoy content that was previously barely accessible for them (if their phone doesn’t support Live Caption, that is). Support for hand-made captions would be even better for these people, but it’s a great first step.

About The Author