[Podcasts] Subtitles for Podcasts

[arebecaIuana]

Thanks for the "karaoke" feature that allows us to follow the lyrics of the songs. It's great for anyone learning a new language or who needs to find a specific part of a song's lyrics, and especially for deaf people who, different from what is generally expected, also like to enjoy music on Spotify and this feature makes the experience more accessible.

However, a similar feature has not yet been implemented in podcasts, which is a shame as there are many creators producing extremely relevant content on the platform, but, for lack of an accessibility feature, this content doesn’t reach as many people as possible and many creators choose to make their content available on platforms that respect the diversity of their audience.

By making some updates to the karaoke feature that already exists on the platform we can have a Spotify more accessible to everyone. The ideal is a tool that generates an automatic description of the spoken content, as present in other online platforms, but also allows edits to be made by the content creator itself.

And then it should be automatically synchronized with the audio and available in the desktop and mobile version as well.

This update will bring more people to Spotify, as many people consume podcast media looking to learn a new language and would like to be able to check words they don't understand well, in addition, browsing the synchronized caption of the content allows you to find which part of a particular episode has the information that the person is looking for.

Most importantly, it will highlight the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities and initiate a dialogue with the disabled people community, because deficiencies are part of human diversity and must be respected.

[Vuittao]

Great idea

[azaniratti]

Excellent idea. If Spotify really searches to be more inclusive, beyond the advertising, this is a formidable initiative. 

[arebecaIuana]

Thank you everyone for the support ❤️ This is really important and I think Spotify team will understand it now and I can't wait to see this feature being implemented

[gabrieladbm]

Amazing idea!

[perehdez]

Yes, great idea!

[user-removed]

I'd very much like to know how to TURN OFF THE PODCASTS.

I DON'T WANT PODCASTS. I WANT MUSIC.

Please make it so we can actually turn them off if we don't want to see them.

[PoetForFun]

There are 466 million persons in the world with disabling hearing loss (6.1% of the world's population according to WHO (https://www.who.int/deafness/estimates/en/ ) and approximately 37 million deaf and hard of hearing people living in the United States according to the National Center for Health Statistics (https://ocdeaf.org/resources/). The absence of subtitles in your podcasts creates a barrier for deaf people and discriminates the Human Rights of millions of persons across the globe. This issue can be solved almost immediately by adding a subtitles/closed captions option, like the one on YouTube. To share a recent example of how the world is taking action and becoming more inclusive: a few months ago, on March 2021, Mexico became the first country ever to make Spanish subtitles mandatory for all movies projected on movie theaters, including movies dubbed into Spanish or originally spoken on Spanish, in order to end a decades-long discrimination against de Deaf Community. Now millions of Mexicans can enjoy the movies for the very first time. https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/movies-mexico-spanish-subtitles-76656720#:~:text=MEXI.... The world needs to become more inclusive. We can do better.

[willydee68]

Well, as much as I would appreciate such a feature, it is not that simple, and I wouldn't put my hopes up. For song lyrics, there usually exists a source which can be just copied/pasted. For podcasts, a written transcript in digital form will rarely be found, unless the creator publishes it out of their own volition. In most cases it would require manual transcription, editing, review, approval of the author, and whatnot. I don't think this would be a feasible feature, unless it is marketed as premium. Similar to Amazon Audible: you can have unlimited books with a Kindle subscription, but for listening to it the customer needs to shell out quite some extra buck.

Sorry to spread such doubts, but I don't see that coming anytime soon.

[fahraway14]

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[Mihail]

Updated on 2021-06-15

Hey everyone,

Thanks for bringing us your feedback in the Spotify Idea Exchange.

Your suggestion has gathered the votes necessary and your feedback is now reaching the internal teams at Spotify. They're aware of the vote count and popularity of this idea. We'll continue to monitor and check out the comments here, too.

As soon as we have any updates on its status, we'll let you know.

More info on how your feedback reaches Spotify via the Idea Exchange can be found here.