Online video sharing and social media platform, YouTube, has recently announced a number of new important updates that it intends to roll out this year.
Some of the updates include audio features and other features aimed at making YouTube inclusive and more accessible.
Features that are beneficial to teachers and students alike include:
Auto-captions for live streaming in English
Auto-captions will be a great feature for English language learners as it will help them hone their English-speaking skills as well as their pronunciation and vocabulary.
It will also be a helpful option for students with special needs especially students with auditory problems.
The auto-caption service will soon accommodate more languages including Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Turkish, etc.
Auto-translations for captions
The YouTube auto-translation for captions in supported languages which is currently only available on Desktop will be available in a mobile version for Android and iOS later in the year.
The auto-captions are available in many languages including English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish.
Multi-audio tracks and descriptive audio feeds
The multi-audio tracks and descriptive audio feeds feature will enable users add multiple audio tracks to their videos especially for users who have international audiences and want to provide multi-language audio for them.
It will also enable users to provide descriptive audio for audiences who are visually impaired.
Other features
YouTube also announced that it will experiment with users having the option to type in the search bar at the top of the transcript to find specific keywords, later in the year.
It also reassured users that the subtitle Editor feature which it previously announced that it was working on, is still in the works.
Adding that there will be a new Channel Permission in YouTube Studio that will enable creators to assign the creation of caption/subtitles on their channels to people they trust.
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