Google announced today that Meet is adding support for live captions to four additional languages. That feature is now available in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish (Spain and Latin America) across all versions of Meet.
The video calling service already supports live captions in English. It relies on Google’s artificial intelligence-powered speech-to-text system to analyze the human speech and transcribe it during a video call. Google says it’s ideal for hearing impaired users, or for noisy environments where users can hardly hear the conversation.
Video call participants can choose the meeting’s spoken language when enabling captions during a Meet session. Live caption settings are also now made "sticky" so that if you turn them on or off during a call, your preferences will be saved for your next meeting.
For now, non-English live captions are available on the web only in the Asia Pacific and EMEA regions. It's live for both enterprise and personal Google accounts. The Mountain View-based tech giant says it plans to bring it to North America and Latin America in early 2021. It will also introduce support for iOS and Android next year.
