Twitter has just expanded its Audio Tweets feature, which lets you record an audio snippet to include with a tweet, to more users on iOS, but perhaps more importantly, Twitter now says it plans to add text to audio Tweets to improve accessibility, which could help address criticism of the feature’s launch on June 17.
If you’d like to get an idea of how audio tweets work right now, simply press play on the tweet below to hear an audio clip from Tom Warren.
Twitter just launched voice tweets. Here’s some exclusive next-gen console news ???? pic.twitter.com/BI228UaSbH— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 17, 2020
Audio Tweets were quickly criticized for not being accessible to users. It then emerged that there was no dedicated team at Twitter to customize limits and accessibility – instead, the company asked employees to return to their regular work to focus on accessibility.
Twitter has since announced two new dedicated teams that will take over accessibility on September 2: one promoting accessibility within Twitter’s products, and the other focused on accessibility for Twitter as a company.
As part of the announcement, Twitter said it plans to add automatic captions to audio and video on the platform by “early 2021.”
It’s not clear when audio versions of audio tweets might be available, and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this topic. And if you want to try out Voice Tweets on other platforms, 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 also plans to start testing voice SMS soon, starting in Brazil.
