Social-Media
Twitter's voice tweets are being rolled out to more iOS users, and transcripts are on the way.
Twitter has just extended its voice tweet function, which lets you record an audio snippet to use with a tweet, to more iOS users. But maybe more importantly, Twitter is now saying that it plans to add transcripts to voice tweets to boost accessibility, which may help resolve the criticism of the June 17 launch function.
If you want to get an idea of how voice tweets work right now, just click play on the tweet below to hear a voice clip from my colleague Tom Warren. There is actually no way to see the captions or the transcription of what he says. (Note: Tom doesn't really share exclusive next-gen console news.)
Without a way to see a transcription, voice tweets were quickly criticized for not being available. Then it turned out that there wasn't a dedicated Twitter Accessibility Team — instead, the organization asked workers to donate their time on top of their regular jobs to concentrate on accessibility. That all meant that one day after the announcement of voice tweets, the company told The Verge that it was exploring how to make the "more committed community" more available.
Since then, Twitter has announced two new accessibility teams on 2 September: one supporting access to Twitter products and one focusing on access to Twitter as a company. And as part of the announcement, Twitter said it's preparing to add automatic audio and video captions to the "early 2021" website.
Twitter just launched voice tweets. Here’s some exclusive next-gen console news pic.twitter.com/BI228UaSbH
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 17, 2020
It's not clear when the transcripts would be available in voice tweets. Twitter did not respond immediately to a request for comments. And if you want to try voice tweets on other sites, you may have to wait a while — the company said on its Twitter Support account that voice tweets will be coming to Android and the web sometime in 2021.
Twitter is also preparing to start testing voice DMs soon, starting in Brazil.
