Live captioning was one of the prominent features of Android 10 when Google unveiled it at Google I / O 2019. Its ability to generate accurate real-time captions, regardless of the audio source, continues to surprise us – and it also works off -line. Google’s Pixel phones were the first to get it, followed by the expansion to other Android smartphones. Google announced yesterday that Live Caption is available to all Chrome users and, with some research on Chromium Gerrit, it looks like Chromebooks won’t have to wait much longer to get it.
We knew that Live Caption was coming to Chromebooks since it first appeared on Chrome flags. We’ve been tracking your progress since February last year and keeping an eye on Chromium Gerrit. Despite the launch of Live Caption on Chrome, Google plans to link it to Chrome OS even more strongly. We recently identified a key that allows this system-wide in Chrome OS Canary.
Live caption of the entire system in Chromium Gerrit
According to the commit, Google is separating Live Caption from the browser on Chrome OS. Instead, he plans to add his files and SODA (Speech on-device API) within the file system. The lightweight model processes the language in real time and generates offline subtitles. With some effort, we activated the experimental system-wide live caption on our Chromebooks.
Multiple languages
Google has been working behind the scenes to add more languages to live subtitles. It is currently limited to English, but that may change soon in a future update. We can take a look at Google’s work by looking inside Live Caption on the operating system settings accessibility page.
A list of languages to choose from in active subtitle settings
There is a brief explanation about Live Caption and how it will add subtitles for media in Chrome. You can choose from six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. When you select a language, your Chromebook will download the language’s speech files in seconds. Although it shows that you have downloaded the files, Chrome OS does not yet add subtitles to foreign videos on YouTube. I also tried to play media in Linux (Beta) and Android apps, but with no luck.
Using live captions on Chromebooks
Live Caption on Chromebooks runs and works in much the same way as its Chrome counterpart on the desktop. When transcribing, he adds a box at the bottom of the screen and inserts words he has taken from the audio. The main difference between the two platforms is the way you turn on feature switching: instead of switching to media controls, Chrome OS integrates it with the volume slider.
Toggle Live Caption on Chrome OS.
Like Android, Chrome OS places the active caption next to the volume slider for quick access. You can tap or click the button to enable or disable the feature. While it’s good that Live Caption is more accessible to users, I’d like Google to make it available in quick bookshelf settings as well.
It will probably take several weeks for Live Caption to be officially available for use on Chrome OS, but we are looking forward to it, as it is great to see one of Android’s best innovative features become one of last year’s newest adopted platforms. We will be attentive to changes in your development and update you on what we find.