Google has added new features to YouTube Live, the live streaming service of the popular video sharing platform, in a bid to provide a better challenge to rivals such as Twitch.
The new features of the live streaming service of YouTube include chat replays and location tags. YouTube Live will also soon roll out automatic English captions, which will leverage on Google's live automatic speech recognition technology.
YouTube Live Now Offers Chat Replays And Location Tags
The updates to YouTube Live were revealed through a post on the official YouTube blog, starting with the new features that are now available for streamers and viewers.
The first new feature is chat replays, which will allow both streamers and viewers to look back at the conversation even when the live stream has ended. The chat replays will appear alongside the video exactly as the messages came in. The feature will allow viewers to relive their favorite moments from streams, but it may be more helpful for the content creators as they may not be able to see all the messages that come in through chat while they are doing their live streams.
The second new feature is that YouTube Live creators can now insert location tags to mobile live streams. This will allow them to share their favorite places to their viewers, and viewers can go through all the videos carrying the same location tags by clicking on them. The location tags are also available permanently on uploaded streams, which will make searching easier.
YouTube also noted that Super Chat, a feature that was rolled out in January that allows viewers to pay for attention from streamers by having their messages highlighted in the chat boxes, now works with IFTTT for better automation. Super Chat is currently available on both the desktop and Android versions of YouTube, with iOS support now being rolled out.
Automatic Captions Coming Soon To YouTube Live
The third new feature for YouTube Live will arrive in the coming weeks, but it may be the most interesting one of the bunch.
If professionally provided captions are not available, YouTube Live streams will soon display automatic English captions to make the videos more accessible to a wider audience. The feature will use Google's LASR technology to provide captions that have latency and error rates that may not be perfect, but nearly as good as industry standards. Following the launch of the YouTube Live automatic captions, Google will continue to work on the feature to further improve latency and accuracy.
