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(Pocket-lint) – Twitter opened the door to character limits on tweets in June 2020. No, you still can’t post essays – texts, anyway. But, you can record an audio message and attach it to your tweet. There are of course a few caveats. Here’s what you need to know about Twitter voice tweets and how they work.
What are voice tweets?
Voice tweets, or tweets with audio, are a compose feature available on the Twitter iOS app. It’s a more creative way to express your thoughts, without having to type everything in manually or be constrained by a character limit. “Sometimes 280 characters are not enough and some nuance of the conversation is lost in the translation,” Twitter said upon launching the voice tweets.
The idea of voice tweets was to give a “more human touch” to the way we use Twitter, by allowing us to express ourselves in our real voice. Voice tweets could also be considered an accessibility feature for the blind or others who have difficulty seeing or typing tweets in a standard way. On the other hand, when voice tweets were first launched, they were criticized for not having subtitles for hearing impaired users. So, in July 2021, Twitter fixed this issue by deploying automatically generated captions in supported languages.
Twitter
How do you use voice tweets
Here’s how Twitter voice tweets work and how to get started so you can send a tweet with a recording of your voice to your followers.
Create a voice tweet
If you want to create a voice tweet, you need to look for the waveform icon when composing a new tweet.
Tap the waveform icon and tap the record button that appears to start recording. Each voice tweet captures up to 140 seconds of audio. Once you’ve reached the time limit for a tweet, a new voice tweet will automatically start and create a tweet thread for you to post. You can attach voice tweets to regular tweets, which basically means you can give your audio message a text caption.
But voice tweets can only be added to original tweets. In other words, you cannot include them in replies or retweets with a comment.
Twitter
Listen to a voice tweet
You will be able to easily spot a voice tweet in your feed, as it appears as an audio clip with the shareer’s profile picture in the background. “Your current profile picture will be added as a static image on your audio attachment and will not be updated if you update your profile picture,” Twitter said when launching the feature. You can listen to voice tweets by pressing the play button.
On your iOS device, a player dock will appear so you can listen to voice tweets in the background, continue scrolling through your feed, and switch apps.
The feature uses your device’s language settings for transcription, so it won’t work properly if your device is set to one language but you speak another. To view the captions for a tweet, click or tap the CC icon in the corner of the voice tweet window. Subtitles only appear on new voice tweets, so you won’t see them on old ones.
We have some news! From today, when you create a voice Tweet (only available on iOS at the moment), automatic captions will be generated in the supported languages.
Access captions from the CC button on accessibility settings for web and mobile devices.
– Twitter accessibility (@ TwitterA11y) July 15, 2021
When will voice tweets be available to everyone?
Twitter launched voice tweets on June 17, 2020 for “a limited group of people” who use the Twitter app on iPhone. They have spread to more iOS users since, but not to Android users yet.
Written by Maggie Tillman. Originally published on .
