Google Meet live captions in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish rolling out

Abner Li | Dec 15 2020 - 9:00 am PT

With the Workspace suite of products, Google wants to leverage machine learning to boost user productivity. One such application of those automated smarts is in Google Meet with Live Captions, which are now available in four more languages.

Announced last year, this feature provides real-time captioning as participants speak. It’s ideal for a whole host of use cases, including calls featuring non-native language speakers and people with hearing impairments, as well as noisy rooms. Google also highlights the distance learning benefits:

Professional development experts often encourage the integration of this technology to make lessons more accessible, especially in the time of COVID-19. We’ve heard from Meet users about how helpful it can be to not only see who is speaking and view their expressions, but also read the text of what they are saying.

After launching in English last year, it now works with French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain and Latin America) for a grand total of six options.

To enable, open the overflow menu in the bottom-right corner and select “Captions.” A panel will let you “select the language people will use in the meeting,” and only one can be set at a time. Caption settings are “sticky,” and will remain enabled/disabled for future meetings.

Starting today, this expanded live captions capability is rolling out to Google Meet users across all Workspace editions on the web. English saw a similar rollout before expanding to the Android client.

It follows Google Meet on Nest Hub Max getting a UI revamp yesterday and the availability of unlimited calls (up to 24 hours) in the free version of Meet until March 31, 2021.