enable closed captioning for Twitter Spaces

Twitter Spaces is the first service to compete directly with Clubhouse. In an exclusive group discussion you can tell stories and invite people to the stage. If you want to follow such a conversation without the sound, you can now enable subtitles in Spaces. We explain how that works.

Twitter Spaces

Twitter Spaces builds on the Clubhouse concept, which became immensely popular in a short space of time. Clubhouse’s Android app is yet to come – the competition is ‘greatly using’ the time Clubhouse is using to set up its Android app. Twitter developed the Spaces service in a short time. Facebook is now also keen on the concept and Spotify says it is actively working on a similar function, which, according to Spotify, may become “just as successful” as Stories have become on different platforms.

Currently Twitter is the only party with a Clubhouse copy and the effect is very similar to that of Clubhouse. In the Spaces, for example, you will always find the speakers at the top, with the button at the bottom to ask if you can come on stage to join the conversation. Other users in Spaces are – just like in Clubhouse – listeners. A disadvantage of Clubhouse is that the service cannot be used by deaf or otherwise disabled people; the app does not offer a built-in tool to directly convert speech to text.

Twitter does offer an option for this in Spaces, so that Spaces can also be followed without sound. This can be useful for deaf or disabled people, but can also be useful in situations that require you not to play sound through your phone’s speakers. Below we offer you a step-by-step plan to enable the subtitles of Spaces.

Enable subtitles

The steps below are for the Twitter app on Android. It is not known to me whether Twitter has also enabled subtitles for Dutch conversations. In English conversations, the subtitles worked as expected. Note that some sentences are not displayed until late. In addition, it also regularly happens that Twitter Spaces adjusts sentences while they are displayed, or that the subtitles are incorrect. It’s not perfect, but for most conversations in Spaces this is enough to follow them.

1. Open the Twitter app on Android
2. Click on it Spaces Conversation in the Fleets bar
3. Then click on the three dots at the bottom of
4. Select View transcripts

After switching on, the subtitles automatically appear at the bottom of the screen. Are you planning to enable Twitter Spaces transcripts? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of the article.