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How to Use Live Caption on Google Chrome

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Google introduced “Live Caption” during Google I/O of 2019. Live Caption is now available for Chrome without any extension. This article explains how to enable Live Caption on Chrome and Chromebooks.

Released as an Android-only feature, captions automatically generate captions for all the media playing on the phone. For example, you could play a podcast and the phone will display the text on the screen in real-time.

Table of Contents

How to Enable Live Caption on Google Chrome

Live Caption is an accessibility feature within Chrome Settings. To turn on live captions:

Open the Chrome menu.
Choose Settings.
Click Advanced.
Click Accessibility.
Click the Live caption slider to enable it.

This enables Live Captions on Chrome. Now, play a video and you should see captions. You can drag the box where the caption appears and place it anywhere on the screen.

Enable the Flag

If you do not have Live Captions on your Chrome browser yet, check if the following flag is enabled.

To enable this flag:

Open chrome://flags
Enable the flag “#enable-accessibility-live-captions”
Restart Chrome.

When this feature is enabled, you can turn captions on or off from the Chrome toolbar. To do this, click the global media control icon and then click the toggle to turn captions on or off.

Live Caption Toggle

Captions are available only in English at the moment. However, it is safe to assume that Google will soon add more languages soon. If you are looking for Chrome captions in languages like French or Spanish, stay tuned to Chrome Story and we will surely bring you all the latest information on this.

Summary

Do you find Chrome’s captions useful or do you prefer closed captions provided by video providers like YouTube? If you have a preference, I would love to hear why.

Please share your thoguths in the comments section below.

Do you have a question related to captions? Let us know in the comments section.

Dinsan

Content Developer and Digital Minimalist. I love testing new Chromebook features and writing about them. My favorite Chrome OS Channel is Canary. | Twitter

June 9, 2020

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6 responses to “How to Use Live Caption on Google Chrome”

howard

March 26, 2021 at 9:13 pm

About Live Caption, I watch these and notice that sentence is not right to match what speaking on video. Not good. But Youtube come with CC is good match during speaking on video. Hope they should be fixing some more for Live Caption in the future.

Reply
Michael

April 14, 2021 at 11:23 pm

I love the live captions. My hearing disability prevents me from understanding spoken words, so being able to view them on my PC screen, is a huge boost.

Suggestion: Currently, when using Chrome on my PC, the live captions window disappears when the other person stops talking. I would like the captions to remain on the screen. Maybe they could scroll. I’m not technical enough to understand whether that’s possible, but it would be a tremendous help to be able to view the ongoing conversation while I’m talking to the other party.

Reply
Joseph

April 24, 2021 at 1:47 pm

I can’t find this option on my chromebook. D:
It’s on version 90, I also manually enabled the flag, and tried changing my device language to English and English-US and still nothing. T_T

Reply
Gary

May 1, 2021 at 6:03 am

How can I save these captions as a text file?

Reply
1. Dinsan Francis
  
  May 3, 2021 at 7:12 am
  
  I do not think this is possible, at least for now. I’ll update this article if I find a way.
  Thanks!
  
  Reply
2. Akash Singh
  
  August 11, 2021 at 8:49 pm
  
  The accuracy is tremendous, but I need to use their data. Please find me help. I am working as freelance Transcriptionist so it’s very kind helpful for me.
  
  Reply