As cameras get better and internet connection gets faster, people can create and upload better and longer videos, fast.
YouTube as the most popular video-streaming platform knows this too well. And by knowing that more and more users use YouTube from their phones, the platform is bringing one of its useful and handy YouTube for the web feature to Android.
And that feature is transcription.
YouTube hosts videos that can be seconds long. While most videos on the platform are minutes long, there are plenty of videos that can be an hour or more.
Long videos can include essays, or podcasts, for example.
For users who wish to go straight to a section of a long video, the transcription feature should help viewers, saving their time by breaking the video to multiple sections.
This feature should be useful for viewers who wish to hunt down a particular quote, for example. With the transcription feature, they don't need to sit through most of the video, of keep on scrolling back and forth until they get what they want.
And this time, YouTube is bringing the feature to Android.
Android users who want to use this feature, can tap on the 'Show Transcript' button under videos they are watching.
Turning the feature on will break a video into different chapters. Viewers can then jump to the different sections of the video they are watching by engaging with the timestamps.
The transcript option looks the same on the desktop, but the one on the mobile has been changed a bit to fit the user interface.
For example, the mobile version doesn't allow users to directly search through lines.
This feature is rolling out to Android users through a server-side update
According to a help page from Google, transcripts "are a simple way of creating captions. They only contain the text of what is said in the video."
It's worth noting that the transcript feature works best with those videos that are less than hour long, and on videos with good sound quality and clear speech.