Clubhouse rolling out live captions for iOS users

San Francisco: Popular audio chat app Clubhouse has started rolling out closed captioning for iOS users.

According to TechCrunch, 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 are English, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Turkish,” a Clubhouse representative was quoted as saying by the website.

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, the report said.

Clubhouse has rolled out several features recently like Wave, which makes it easier to start a conversation with a friend, replays for asynchronous listening and recorded rooms.

Recorded rooms help the app compete with startups like Callin and Space Pod, which seek to help creators turn live audio recordings into widely-distributed podcasts.

But live captioning has been a glaring omission since the app’s initial bout of popularity, the report said.