Geek News

YouTube is making live broadcasts more accessible by giving creators the power to add real-time captions in the English language. They could provide their own if they plan to read off a script or have access to professional captioners that can feed their work to the platform. But YouTube live broadcasts tend to be unscripted and pretty interactive, so creators can also choose to depend on the platform's live automatic speech recognition technology to auto-generate captions. The feature was developed by product manager Liat Kaver, who's deaf herself and was inspired by the lack of subtitles in her native language as a girl growing up in Costa Rica. She told us: "I am deaf, so closed captions are indispensable to enjoying content. Today, finding live streams that are captioned is a challenge, which is why this project is so important to me. Our end goal is to make every video accessible, leveraging Google's technology to achieve universal captioning. I'm exci...

You don't need to use another app to put GIF stickers all over your pictures before uploading them to Instagram Stories anymore. Next time you add a photo or a video to your story, you'll find a new GIF option within the usual sticker menu accessible via the icon on the top left portion of the screen. You can look through all the animated stickers available -- powered by GIPHY, of course -- or you can search for specific categories. Searching for "accessories" will give you GIFs that you can layer over faces, while "effects" will surface those that can add ambiance to photos. Want those cute/annoying GIFs that pop up from behind objects? Search for "peekers." You can also type in "word art" to see all text-based graphics, "emoji" to bring up emoji sets and words like "happy birthday" and "congratulations" to find themed GIFs. All these will be available sometime today once the latest version of Instagram ...