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This gray box is live caption in action. It’s great for Jim Salter’s podcast and any other untitled audio on the web.
Ron Amadeo
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The settings. It shows how the small startup download is 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 did not do 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 voice and text technology to any audio source, making it easy to get captions on to get audio that is not available. department. As of today, Google is launching the feature on Chrome 89 and later on computers.
You can enable the feature from the Chrome settings by going to “Advanced” and “Accessibility” and then turning on “Live Caption”. Live captions appear on web pages as a gray box filled with text while the video or audio is playing. You can drag the box around so it never gets in the way, and you can even choose between two sizes. Live Caption will try to work with every audio source on the internet; 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 captions for some time, so they are not very useful, but they are a good patch for everyone 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 make captions of music. It’s not perfect, but for plain words it works pretty well.
Google says all the processing takes place locally on your device and will not end up on the internet. Interestingly, downloading the feature causes a ten-second download for the first time. On my computer it looks like Chrome has about 130 MB of speech data in two new folders named “SODA” (Speech 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 there will eventually be more language support.
Google says Live Caption “currently supports English and is available worldwide on the latest version of Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux devices and will be coming to ChromeOS soon.”