How to record and share an audio clip with your tweet
How to record and share an audio clip with your tweet
Twitter burst open the gate to character limits on tweets in June 2020. No, you still can't post essays - text ones, anyway. But, you can record an audio message and attach it to your tweet. Naturally, there are some caveats. What you need to know about Twitter voice tweets and how they work is explained below.
What are voice tweets and how do they work?
Voice tweets, or tweets with audio, are a type of tweet that can be composed using the Twitter iOS app. They allow you to express yourself more freely, without having to manually type everything out or being constrained by a character limit. "At times, 280 characters is insufficient, and some conversational nuance is lost in translation," Twitter stated at the time the voice tweets were launched.
The goal of voice tweets was to give Twitter a "more human touch" by allowing users to express themselves using their actual voice. Voice tweets could also be considered an accessibility feature for the blind or other individuals who have difficulty seeing or typing tweets in the conventional manner. On the other hand, when voice tweets were first introduced, they were criticized for lacking captions for hearing-impaired users. As a result, Twitter addressed this issue in July 2021 by rolling out captions that are automatically generated in supported languages.
How do you use voice tweets
Here's how Twitter's voice tweets work and how to get started sending a tweet to your followers that includes a recording of your voice.
Create a voice tweet
To create a voice tweet, look for the waveform icon while writing a new tweet.
To begin recording, tap the waveform icon and then the record button that appears. Each voice tweet records audio for up to 140 seconds. Once you've reached the tweet's time limit, a new voice tweet will automatically begin and create a tweet thread for you to post to. You can attach voice tweets to regular tweets, which essentially means you can add a text caption to your audio message.
However, voice tweets can be added to only original tweets. In other words, they cannot be included in replies or retweets accompanied by a comment.
Listen to a voice tweet
A voice tweet is easily identifiable in your feed because it appears as an audio clip with the sharer's profile picture as the background. When the feature launched, Twitter stated that "your current profile photo will be added as a static image to your audio attachment and will not refresh if you update your profile photo." By tapping the play button, you can listen to voice tweets.
A player dock will appear on your iOS device, allowing you to listen to voice tweets in the background while scrolling through your feed or switching apps.
How do voice tweet captions work?
When you record a voice tweet, captions in the following supported languages are automatically generated: English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, Korean, and Italian.
Because the feature makes use of your device's language settings, it will not work properly if your device is set to one language but you speak in another. To view a tweet's captions, click or tap the CC icon in the upper-right corner of the voice tweet window. Captions are only visible on new voice tweets; they are not visible on older ones.
When will voice tweets be available to all?
On 17 June 2020, Twitter began offering voice tweets to "a select group of people" who use the Twitter app for iPhone. They've since expanded to include more iOS users, but not yet Android users.
