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This gray box is subtitled live in action. It’s great for Jim Salter’s podcast and any other audio without subtitles on the web.
Ron Amadeo
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The settings. This shows the small initial download in action.
Ron Amadeo
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It also works on YouTube, but YouTube already has automatic captions.
Ron Amadeo
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Stress test! It didn’t go well at Rap God.
Ron Amadeo
Google is officially bringing its “Live Caption” technology to any website with the new version of Chrome. The feature, which debuted on Pixel phones and should be available on most Android 10+ devices, allows you to easily apply Google’s speech-to-text technology to any audio source, making it simple to obtain audio subtitles that have no departmental accessibility. . As of today, Google is starting to launch the feature for Chrome 89 and higher on desktop PCs.
You can enable the feature in Chrome’s settings by going to “Advanced” and “Accessibility” and then enabling “Live Caption”. Live captions appear on web pages as a gray box that fills with text as the video or audio is played. You can drag the box so it never gets in the way, and you can even choose between two sizes. Live Caption will attempt to work with all audio sources on the web; you can temporarily close the box each time you load a page, but there is no way to enable it on some sites and disable it on others.
Some Google services, like YouTube and Google Meet, have had machine-generated subtitles for some time, so it’s not very useful there, but it’s a good Band-Aid for everything else. This means that podcasts, Twitch streams, social media sites, other video chat services, streaming sites and more are covered. The feature even tries to subtitle music. It is not perfect, but for words spoken clearly, it works very well.
Google says that all processing takes place locally on your device and will not end on the Internet. Interestingly, activating the feature for the first time will trigger a 10-second download. On my computer, it looks like Chrome has put about 130 MB of voice data in two new folders called “SODA” (Speech On-device API) and “SODALanguagePacks.” At the moment, the feature only works for English and the only language pack is “en-US”, but it looks like support for multiple languages will arrive eventually.
For now, Google says Live Caption “currently supports English and is available globally in the latest version of Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux devices and will soon be on ChromeOS.”
List image by Isaac Bowen / Flickr