YouTube’s exciting new features

YouTube is all set to make the live viewing experience better. They have announced a few new features including the introduction of automatic English captions to live streamers.

In case the video makers do not have their own scripts or professional captioners at hand, they can depend on YouTube automatic speech recognition technology (LASR) to auto-generate captions.

The feature was developed by product manager Liat Kaver, who is hearing impaired. The absence of subtitles in her native language is what prompted her to come up with this feature. It will be available in the next few weeks to a small percentage of users and will be rolled to a larger crowd in the coming months. The company says the feature will be available in more languages in the future.

Other interesting announcements by YouTube include the introduction of live chat replays. YouTube will preserve chats that take place during a live stream, which shows up beside the stream. Users who missed the comments during the live stream can now play it back and it will appear beside the video.

The company has also announced a geotag feature. Creators who livestream with smartphones can geotag the location. Users can click or tap on the location tag to see other videos from that area. Users can also filter the search and limit to viewing videos from a particular area.