Twitter Expands Rollout of Voice Tweets Feature for iOS Users
Twitter says it's making its voice tweets feature available to more users on iOS. Launched in June for a limited number of users, voice tweets is designed to allow people to tweet with their voice, sending voice-based messages instead of text.
Voice tweets can be created by opening up the tweet composer and tapping the new wavelengths icon. A screen then opens with a user's Twitter icon, which can be tapped to begin a recording.
Twitter users can capture up to 140 seconds of audio, but continuous recording is possible and longer audio will create multiple voice tweets.
Listening to a voice tweet can be done by tapping on the image in the Twitter timeline. On iOS, playback starts in an audio player that's docked at the bottom of the timeline so users can continue to scroll through Twitter.
Since their arrival on iOS, voice tweets have been
criticized for lacking accessibility in the form of audio transcriptions. That criticism led
Twitter employees to reveal they'd been asked to volunteer their time on top of their usual work to focus on accessibility.
The ensuing flak led Twitter to tell The Verge that it was exploring how to build a "more dedicated group" to focus on accessibility, and the company has since announced new two teams in that vein. Twitter subsequently said it plans to add automated captions to audio and video on the platform by "early 2021."
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
I guess you don’t become a multi billion dollar company by doing stupid things like paying people.
And FWIW, that sample image looks like total clickbait. All it needs is a photo of an attractive woman with some skimpy article of clothing to make it complete.
But to be clear, there's no formal accessibility team at Twitter—that's one of the things these people are volunteering. And there's no compensation to the team for adding this work to their original work.
They are not, however, being asked to volunteer, or being asked to stay "after work" to do this. They're just cramming it into their normal 8 hours with the sort of nod nod wink wink of their supervisors.
The bigger story here is that Twitter has no accessibility team.