Clubhouse announced recently that closed captioning is now rolling out for iOS. This essential accessibility feature has been long missed from the live audio app. Without these live transcriptions, which were already the norm for competitors like Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse had rendered itself unusable to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Now, Clubhouse can reach a broader audience.
“We currently support 13 languages for captions, with more on the way. These 13 languages include: English, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Turkish,”
One user reported on Twitter that Spanish live captioning worked in one room, but in another, the Spanish speech was transcribed as English gibberish. An engineer at Clubhouse replied that this means the language detection might not have worked, so it seems that the app is still learning how to distinguish among non-English languages in beta.
Clubhouse doesn’t have an estimate of when closed captioning will roll out on Android, but hopefully it won’t be long.
