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This gray box is live captioning in action. It’s great for Jim Salter’s podcast and all other unsubtitled audio on the web.
Ron Amadeo
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The settings. This shows the small start-up 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 do well at Rap God.
Ron Amadeo
Google is officially bringing its “Live Caption” technology to every website with the new version of Chrome. The feature, which debuted on Pixel phones and should be available on most Android 10+ devices, makes it easy to apply Google’s speech-to-text technology to any audio source, making it easy to get subtitles. at audio that is not accessible department. Starting today, Google will begin rolling out the feature to Chrome 89 and above on desktop PCs.
You can enable the feature through Chrome’s settings by going to “Advanced” and “Accessibility”, then turning on “Live Captioning”. Live captions appear on web pages as a gray box that fills with text as the video or audio plays. You can drag the box so it never gets in the way, and you can even choose between two sizes. Live Caption tries to work with any audio source on the web; you can temporarily close the box each time you load a page, but it’s not possible to enable it on some websites and disable it on others.
Some Google services, like YouTube and Google Meet, have had machine-generated captions for a while, so it’s not very useful there, but it’s a nice band-aid for everything else. That means podcasts, Twitch streams, social media sites, other video chat services, streaming sites, and more are all covered. The feature even tries to subtitle music. It’s not perfect, but for clearly spoken words, it works quite well.
Google says that all processing happens locally on your device and doesn’t end up on the internet. Interestingly, enabling the feature for the first time triggers a 10-second download. On my computer, it looks like Chrome has dropped about 130MB of voice data into two new folders named “SODA” (Speech API on device) and “SODAlanguagePacks.” At the moment the feature only works for English, and the only language pack is “en-US”, but it looks like more languages will come eventually.
For now, Google says Live Caption “currently supports English and is available worldwide in the latest version of Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux devices, and will be available soon for ChromeOS.”
List image by Isaac Bowen / Flickr