YouTube's Automatic Live Stream Captions Arrive For All Creators

If you're tired of waiting for a live stream to end so that you can watch it with captions, YouTube's latest announcement includes some good news. The company has revealed that its automatic captions feature is now available to all creators on the platform, including accounts that didn't meet its previous subscriber requirement.

YouTube's automatic captions are available on most videos, but there's a limit: they're available on published videos, not live ones. This makes it harder for viewers who have reduced hearing or who are deaf to enjoy live-streamed content. YouTube started addressing this with automatic captions on live streams.

The feature was rolled out to some creators already, but YouTube limited it to channels that had at least 1,000 subscribers. That has changed and now all creators on the platform can enable the feature for their live streams, including those who have fewer than 1,000 subscribers.

The live auto captions are only available on live streams that take place in English, though it is still a big improvement for users who need accessibility features. YouTube says it will expand the automatic live captions feature to all live streams that feature its 13 supported auto-captioning languages.

Creators can enable the automatic live captioning feature in YouTube Studio; it is a simple toggle switch under the "closed captions" menu. Beyond that, YouTube says it will also roll out automatic caption translations on iOS and Android later on this year.