YouTube will provide live streams with automatic subtitles

YouTube has announced that it will soon be possible to provide live streams with automatic captions. These English subtitles are created using speech recognition technology that converts the spoken text in a video into words.

YouTube wants to use this to increase the accessibility of live streams on the video platform. As soon as professional captions are not available, the captions will be available. This functionality, which was introduced in 2009 and became generally available in 2010, will be added in the coming weeks. According to YouTube, the lasr speech recognition technology has been further improved so that fewer errors are made and the delay is reduced.

To further improve YouTube users’ live streaming experience, YouTube is making the live chat, which can be seen on the right during a live stream, also available to users after the stream has ended. Once the stream is re-watched afterwards, the live chat will sync with the video. Finally, streamers on YouTube will soon be able to make their location available via geotagging.