Closed Captioning Comes To Chrome

English Only For Now

Alphabet, or Google if you prefer, is expanding the closed captioning support they offer on YouTube, Pixel devices and many Android phones.  As of the Chrome 89 and later, you can enable Live Captions in the Accessibility section found under Settings -> Advanced.  Toggle the option on to have a grey box appear on websites you visit which will display text which matches an audio or video source on a website.  You can resize the box, or close it if you don’t want to make use of it on that page.  Currently it is a global setting, either it is enabled for all pages or disabled, you cannot as of yet pick and choose when it activates.

As you’d expect the text is machine generated, however it is interesting to see that it is your device which does the heavy lifting, as opposed to the text being generated on the cloud before being displayed.  Ars Technica saw a 130MB download occur when they first enabled the option, which included the API as well as a single language pack, EN-US.  The design lends credence to the belief that more languages will be added over time, which will increase the footprint of the program if you intend to install multiple languages as they become available.

There is no mention of live translation being incorporated into this feature, but it does seem a likely next step.