How to add Close Captions to Twitch Streamings

How To add Close Captios to Twitch Streaming
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If you want to make your Gameplay and Videos more accesible, enable Close Caption to your streamings with free OBS Plugin: Closed Caption OBS Plugin.
Twitch has added native support for viewers to enable closed captions (or subtitles) while watching livestreams. All you have to do is send that data to Twitch along with your video and audio. In this video, we’ll go through the simplest method for setting that up in OBS Studio so that you can widen your reach as a creator and offer viewers the ability to enable subtitles for your stream.

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Why you must have Close Caption on your Twitch Streamings

Did you know that 23 percent of people watching this YouTube channel turn on the closed captions?

a big portion of the internet, and your potential audience on Twitch may suffer from hearing loss, or not having English as their first language, or are simply wanting to watch content in a place where they
can’t listen to the audio. Now, did you know that just like with YouTube videos, Twitch also has the ability
to show closed captions, but on your live streams? Where anybody that is watching your livestream can just click one little button on the player and see closed captions to show exactly what you’re saying. And no, I’m not talking about needing to enable some kind of Twitch extension, or open up a website every single time you stream. 

Let me give you 6 reasons why es good to have captions on your live streaming:

  1. Improved accessibility: Captions make it easier for deaf or hard-of-hearing viewers to follow along with the content.

  2. Increased engagement: Captions can help to keep viewers engaged, as they allow them to follow along with the content even if they are not able to listen to it.

  3. Improved SEO: Captions can help to improve the search engine ranking of your stream, as they provide additional text that search engines can index.

  4. Increased reach: Captions can help to make your stream more accessible to a wider audience, including those who may not speak the language spoken in the stream.

  5. Improved understanding: Captions can help to improve understanding of the content, particularly for viewers who may have a hard time understanding spoken language or accents.

  6. Enhanced viewer experience: Captions can help to enhance the viewer experience, as they allow viewers to easily follow along with the content and understand what is being said.

I’m talking about functionality that’s built directly into Twitch. Where your viewers can choose to enable subtitles in live streams or VODs, on desktop or on mobile, and it’s completely free and easy to setup with OBS Studio.

Setup Close Captions on Twitch

Close OBS Studio and go to https://github.com/ratwithacompiler/OBS-captions-plugin. Go to “Releases” and download the current version. Choose the proper version for your operative system. 

This plugin will take the raw input from your microphone, sending that across to
Google’s transcribing services, transcribing it, taking that data back, and then sending it across the
official channels to Twitch
so that your viewers can enable it if they wish to. 

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Drag and drop The folder into “obs plugins” inside OBS program file folders.

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If you click that, it will open up a new box where there’ll be a settings window where we will now configure the plugin. First option that we’re going to change is this caption source, and you want to select here the raw microphone that you are using, so for me, that is chat mic Go XLR cause this microphone goes through my Go XLR, but you basically want to set here the microphone you’re using, whatever it’s called in OBS Studio or your device.
If you’re using something like the El gato Wave or a Go XLR and all your audio gets mixed together into one channel, you’ll still hear once you select the raw microphone input if you can, so make sure that’s added and then select it here.

Select main mic close captions twitch
The “Caption When” option, is basically choosing when you want to write captions, so, here the default of “Caption Source is heard on stream”, this basically means that if you ever mute your main microphone, it won’t keep making captions, which is really useful if you ever need to take a phone call or something whilst your on stream and you don’t want that still to be captioned for your audience, potentially leaking unwanted info.

Check if your plugin was installed correctly going to Tools -> Cloud Closed Captions

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Set the language that you are speaking and choose where we want to output the captions to, so whether that’s streams only, your local recordings a combination of both, or just to disable it.

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The next few options can just be left at their default, so I wouldn’t recommend changing lines from three because currently on Twitch it’s not really supported, and everything else can be left at their defaults. That’s pretty much it for the settings.
but I do want to point out that this plugin has plenty more functionality, if you want to save your transcripts into SRT files that you then upload to YouTube or use on TikTiok or Instagram
Save transcriptions from OBS to Tik tok twitch

On Text Filtering option, you can even do some text replacements if there’s some common words that it keeps getting wrong, maybe some technical terms from a game that you’re playing you can actually set it to replace certain words with all this. But we’re just going to cover the basics in this tutorial.

Enable Caption on Caption Settings.

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Just before we enable the caption service, if we click save and close down this preview box, you should have a dock showing of the captions. If you don’t, you can come up to view docks and make sure you have captions checked and of course because this is OBS Studio, you can drag and position this dock wherever you would like.
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And at any time you can just jump back into the settings by clicking cogwheel at Caption Dock. You can see right now we have closed captions disabled because we haven’t enabled it yet. 

Press on “Show Preview” and actually show it live transcription even though we’re not streaming. So as soon as you start streaming, this would normally enable, but we can test it by clicking show preview. Now this sometimes takes around 10 seconds to actually start working, to hook onto the Google transcribing API, I think its actually Google text to speech which is the same service that YouTube uses.

But you can see now it is transcribing what I’m saying and writing it out, which will now display on my stream if people choose to enable it on Twitch.

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Enabling from the viewer side

So now that we’ve set up the streamer side of the closed caption plugin, how do your viewers actually enable captions on your stream? Cause like I mentioned at the beginning, this is down to the viewers if they want to enable or disable it. They’re not hard embedded into your streams. So next time you go live on Twitch, your viewers will see a little CC button here on the Twitch player, which they can click to enable the closed captions and click again to disable. They also have complete control over the appearance of the captions on their end by opening up the closed captions options here where they can customize the text and background colors through some presets that they’ve already made for you, or then they can really customize things if they want to change the font, size, color, alignment, position, and opacity of the captions. These same options of enabling and disabling captions will also be available to anyone watching your VODs on Twitch. So it’s not just for when you’re live streaming, people watching you VODs will also be able to enable captions if they wish to. I’d still recommend probably having a chat command or a timed message, just letting people know how they can enable and disable the captions if they wish to it’s just worth educating your audience in how they can get the most out of your streams. If you’re running a Jewel PC setup, with a gaming PC and a streaming PC, and you’re using like a mixer that mixes all of your audio sources together, so your streaming PC only receives one audio source, then this is going to be a little more tricky to set up because you want to still just send the raw audio to the Google transcribing API and not your mixed audio, which has game sounds and music and alerts and things like that in, cause you want it just to be your microphone that is being captioned. If that is your use case, it’s actually relatively simple to fix, so if we look down here in OBS, I have a broadcast stream mix, which is my microphone, but everything else included in that, my game audio, my alerts, that’s the things I don’t want to be transcribed. What we need to do is open up our settings and make sure that we add a second audio source, so here a mic auxiliary audio two we just our microphone, which is our chat mic, add that, and you can see it down at the bottom. You’ll then want to mute that source, so that your stream doesn’t hear your voice twice and it’s just still hearing the broadcast stream mix. And then in our caption settings, we change the caption source to be our mic only input which is mic aux two, and then we change our caption when mute source is heard on stream. So that’s the main setting that you need to change and then we set our mute source to be our broadcast stream mix. This basically just means that we’re still just captioning our microphone, we’re going to caption when the stream mix is heard on streams, so if we still mute our stream mix at any point, it’s going to stop the captions from going through. That’s the only difference with a complex Jewel PC setup really, if you still want to do closed captioning.
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