Indian Content Creators using YouTube have something to celebrate. YouTube has announced several new audio features, some which have already launched, while others will be rolled out in the next few months.
Since October 8, Indian creators can enable auto captions for any live streams in English, allowing for more inclusivity and reach global audiences. This has been upgraded for users, who previously could only access this feature if their channel had more than 1,000 subscribers.
Down the line, YouTube will expand live auto captions to all 13 supported automatic captioning languages comprising Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
YouTube will also release auto-translation for captions in supported languages on both Android and iOS; a feature which is currently restricted to the desktop version of the platform. Later in the year, the company will enable creators to search through caption transcripts on mobile platforms. They will “experiment with the option to type in the search bar at the top of the transcript to find specific keywords,” as per YouTube’s public post.
They are also exploring a feature that will provide the ability to add multiple audio tracks on videos to offer multi-language audio for international audiences along with descriptive audio for people with vision impairments. At the moment, the feature is available to selected creators, however YouTube will release it more widely in the next few months.
There’s an update to the channel permissions as well under the previously announced “Subtitle Editor” feature. As part of the new launch, YouTube Studio will allow creators to delegate caption and subtitle creation on their videos to a third party.
“Improving accessibility is a top priority for YouTube, and we hope these updates will help creators reach a wider audience,” the company said in the post.
YouTube first launched auto-captions in 2010 and has been steadily making updates and improvements to enhance content creators’ user experience. Then in 2018, the company released auto-captions.
During this year’s edition of Brandcast 2021, YouTube’s largest advertising event, Google India VP and MD Sanjay Gupta stated that YouTube is being used by many brands as a primary vehicle to reach consumers and that the video streaming platform has witnessed a huge shift in consumption patterns over the last year. As of 2021, around 225 million users are active on YouTube every hour with the country having the most active users. The numbers are only expected to increase exponentially.
Visit YouTube’s recently launched India Community for more details