YouTube’s AI-powered live captioning is now available to everyone

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If you’re a YouTube creator, your channel now has AI-powered automatic live stream captions, regardless of your subscriber count. That’s a big win for accessibility across the entire site, where it previously was limited to channels with 1,000 subscribers or more.

That makes the whole of YouTube more accessible to deaf or hard-of-hearing users, who were previously left out when creators live stream. Live auto-captioning is also coming to 12 more languages, not including English which was already supported.

Those include Japanese, Turkish, and Spanish, and auto-captioning is also coming to mobile devices. Creators are also getting the ability to add multiple audio tracks, to support multiple languages (and audio descriptions for those users with limited eyesight).

READ MORE: Apple is bringing live captioning to iPhone, iPad, and Mac

The additional language support for live and auto-translated captions are coming in the “next few months” and YouTube is bringing the multiple audio track support in “the coming quarters.”

The “Open transcript” function from desktop YouTube is coming to the mobile apps, as a limited “experiment.” Hopefully, that stays, as the ability to search transcripts is an invaluable tool for anyone who has to summarize video content.

The last thing YouTube mentioned today is the upcoming Subtitle Editor permission, which lets creators designate community members to create and upload subtitles to their videos.

READ MORE: How to turn on and use Live Caption on Android

This was created to replace the community captions feature that was removed last year. It’s still in progress, with YouTube promising a bigger update “in the coming months.”

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.