You don’t have to attend meetings even if you rely on live captions
Since their resurgence as prominent everyday tools following the pandemic’s onset, video conferencing utilities have improved greatly. Some of the best video calling apps have led the charge with regular feature additions, bug fixes, and accessibility improvements. Case in point, Google Meet has added in-meeting live translated captions to help bridge language barriers, distances, and disabilities. Now, Google is making this feature even better by including captions in meeting recordings.
People with hearing disabilities like partial or complete deafness usually rely on subtitles for movies, and Google introduced real-time auto-generated subtitles for Meet calls in the US in mid-2021 to help on this front. Now, when hosts or co-hosts record a meeting, they also can enable captions for the recording — provided the Google Workspace account supports recording, of course. Teachers and co-teachers will also see this option now if they started the Meet session through Google Classroom.
Google Meet’s new option to caption recordings will be made available to meeting hosts with eligible Workspace accounts
This nifty little addition will save hearing-impaired participants the hassle of attending meetings at inconvenient times, or using a third-party speech-to-text utility to watch and understand Meet recordings. Disappointingly, controls for recording captions are only available to hosts of the call, so they would have to be cognizant of the needs of their attendees when setting up the Meet session. The hosts will also have to share the captioned recording, which is saved in their Google Drive as an MP4 file in a folder labeled “Meet Recordings.”
The feature has started showing up for some users already, but don’t be alarmed if you’re not seeing it when starting a Meet recording — Google says the rollout will be complete by March 15. Since this is an accessibility feature, Google has made it available to all accounts with native permission to record meetings. If your organization doesn’t take advantage of this new option, however, you can enable Android’s Live Transcribe feature or Chrome’s Live Captions to get similar transcriptions while watching Meet recordings.
