Ever wondered how you could catch up on some interesting news while at a meeting, a social gathering or when traveling without disturbing or letting know your colleagues or family. It is tough, most of the time, a trending news requires you to watch video and listen to the audio to understand the full content. This also affects millions of users worldwide who have difficulty in hearing. Well, now there is a solution, continue reading to know more.
Google has always been on top of the technology and constantly innovating their products for a better user experience. Google has once again proved that it is an inclusive company by introducing Live Caption for audio and video on content played using Chrome. This will benefit millions of people who have challenges hearing or who cannot hear and of course to all those other users who do not want to use audio.
With Live Caption on Chrome, a user can process live captions for video with audio. The Live Caption feature works covering all social, business, etc. sites with video playing facility. This feature also works well in platforms like, podcasts and radio content, users personal library, third party video players, and also web-based video or audio chat services.
When tested, the Live Captions appear in a box below the content played. The captions also appear in a movable box. The user also can play content with muted audio or with lower volume making it easy for users to understand content and enjoy the content played at their convenience. Another interesting feature is that the Live Caption even works when the device is offline; this makes the feature even more better by letting use this service from anywhere. The offline feature enables user to caption audio and video files saved on desktop’s hard drive when media played in Chrome.
You can turn on Live Caption feature in Chrome from Chrome Settings. Go to Advanced > Accessibility and click Captions to configure your system accordingly.
The user can configure the system by selecting the applicable choice from the following fields in the Captions section:
- Text size (Also applies to Live Caption)
- Text font
- Text color
- Text opacity
- Text shadow
- Background color
- Background opacity
The new Caption feature on Chrome supports only English language currently and is available on latest Chrome release for Linux, Mac and Windows devices; and will soon be available on ChromeOS devices.
For Android devices, Live Caption is already available media on the user’s mobile device. To turn on Live Caption in Chrome from your mobile, go to Chrome Settings, click on the Advanced section, Click Accessibility button and click Captions to configure your mobile accordingly.
The user can configure the system by selecting the applicable choice from the following fields in the Captions section:
- Language
- Text size
- Caption style
Chrome downloads a speech recognition file to the device. Once the file is downloaded, media containing spoken text is played; it is converted to a Live Caption and will appear in a movable box.
Google respects it user’s privacy, since the Live Captions are generated on the computer or mobile, it makes sure that the personal local video and audio files the users wants to caption are not being captured or processed in the Google’s cloud.
The Live Caption feature will benefit billions of user’s making web based video or audio content easily accessible, especially for people with hearing challenges. Google with this well thought feature addition, makes the Chrome even more user friendly.