Google announced its Live Captioning feature earlier this year at I/O, a great initiative that’ll help users with different hearing abilities understand what’s happening in videos presented on their screens.
Today, Google has announced on its G Suite Updates blog the feature is making a debut in Hangouts Meet, the paid-version of Hangouts video conferencing for G Suite users.
Users in a conference will be able to toggle Live Captions on/off with a button in the UI in English, or in the overflow menu in other languages. It’s not yet available on iOS (which is weird when you consider Hangouts’ pedigree has often seen features sorry on iOS first), but the team is looking to add it in the coming months.
Handily, it looks like the name of the user who’s speaking is prefixed to their captions. However, it appears the Live Captions are local to individual users in the conference and so they can’t be saved or exported. It would be useful for the Live Captions to form a transcript of a video conference.
G Suite admins don’t need to do anything to enable the feature.
