Live Caption is one of the most underrated features to come to Android in years. Whether you’re hard of hearing, deaf, in a loud environment, or forget to bring your headphones, it automatically transcribes any audio coming from your phone for you. We long knew that Live Caption is on its way to Chrome as well, and we just spotted it working on the stable Chrome 88 release today — you just need to activate a flag.
As of now, Live Caption is only available as a flag under chrome://flags/#enable-accessibility-live-caption and needs to be enabled manually. Once the flag is activated and your browser restarted, just start any video and look for the global media control menu to the right of your address bar. In there, you need to activate a new Live Caption toggle (which was first spotted by Chrome Story).
Live Caption is still a bit buggy right now, and you often have to toggle it off and on to get it to work after you pause a video. It also currently doesn’t work with YouTube content at all on stable (though it does just fine on Canary). But once you know Live Caption’s current limitations and quirks, it works well enough.
We can confirm Live Caption is functional on Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS, though there’s no quick toggle on Chrome OS to enable the feature on the fly — you need to search for “Live Caption” in your system settings and toggle it on or off there. On Chrome OS, Live Caption also only works in Chrome; it’s not functional in Android and Linux apps yet.
Working on YouTube in Chrome Canary.
It’s great to see one of Android’s more innovative features making its way into more Google products, and we can only hope that Google is soon ready to switch it on for everyone by default.
