Chrome is a great browser for online videos and audio. It has a built-in microphone and speaker, so you can easily capture video or audio with your voice. However, sometimes it can be difficult to get live captions for videos or audio. Here are some tips to help you get the best results:
- Start by opening Chrome and typing in the video or audio title. Then, click on the “capture” button at the top of the screen.
- When Chrome starts capturing, it will show a list of all of the videos or audio that it has captured. You can select one of these videos or audio files to capture with your voice.
- Once you have selected a file to capture, click on the “capture” button again. This will start capturing your video or audio in real time!
- To stop Chrome from capturing any more videos oraudio, click on the “stop” button at the top of the screen.
Google Chrome itself can create captions for any video or audio-only content playing in the web browser. It works in the same way as Live Caption on Google Pixel phones. At the time of this writing, the feature is only available in English.
To enable Live Caption, open Google Chrome on your Windows 10, Mac, or Linux computer and then click the three-dot menu icon in the top-right of the window.
Next, select “Settings” from the menu.
In the left sidebar, expand the “Advanced” section and select “Accessibility.”
Toggle on the “Live Caption” option. Some speech recognition files will immediately download. If you don’t see the Live Caption toggle, try updating your browser.
Once the files are done downloading, Live Caption is ready to use! Go to a website and play a video or anything with transcribable audio. The captions will appear in a translucent black box at the bottom of the screen.
You can click the “X” button found in the top-right corner of the caption’s black box to close the caption. You can also select the small down arrow to see more text. If you close the caption box, you’ll need to refresh the page to bring it back.
To toggle Live Caption on or off, you don’t have to go to the Settings menu every time. Instead, click the media icon in the Chrome toolbar, and you’ll find a toggle for “Live Caption.”
That’s it! The feature—theoretically—works on any website as long as there’s something transcribable playing. We tested it successfully on YouTube, Disney+, and even the Spotify Web Player.
As you can see above, the accuracy of the captions is a bit hit or miss (“Western” should be “wasting”). This is still a handy feature for those sites that don’t have their own captioning system.
RELATED: How to Use Live Captions on a Google Pixel Phone
