Google in efforts to make online content more accessible and understandable to you has expanded its real-time caption feature, Live Captions to all Chrome browser users. The feature uses machine learning to spontaneously create captions for videos or audio that have none thus making the web more interesting for everyone that would like to follow along to whatever content they’re are watching and especially more important to over 466 million people in the world who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Now with Live Caption on Chrome, you can automatically generate real-time captions for media with audio on your browser. It works across social and video sites, podcasts and radio content, personal video libraries (such as Google Photos), embedded video players, and most web-based video or audio chat services. If you enable Live Captions a small, moveable box with words will appear at the bottom of your browser.
Google says these captions in Chrome are created on-device, which allows the captions to appear as the content plays without ever having to leave your computer. Live Caption also works offline, so you can even caption audio and video files saved on your hard drive when you play them in Chrome.
To turn on Live Caption in Chrome from your desktop, go to Chrome Settings, click on the Advanced section, then go to the Accessibility section. Watch this tutorial video if you are finding it hard to get the settings. Sadly for you all Swahili videos lovers, the feature is only currently supporting English. It has been rolled globally on the latest release of Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux devices and will be coming soon to ChromeOS. For Android devices, Live Caption is already available for any audio or video on your mobile device.
I have personally tried and I love it. When you toggle to turn it on, your Chrome browser will quickly download some speech recognition files, and then captions should appear the next time you play an audio or video where people are talking. If you don’t see the feature, then it is probably because your Chrome is an old version and you might want to update it.
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