The feature is similar to YouTube’s auto-transcription capabilities, but works for all audio played through Chrome, including videos, podcasts, and voice calls. It also works for Chrome Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) like YouTube and YouTube Music—and the feature is available available on select Android devices, too.
Live Captions is a useful accessibility feature for those with hearing impairments, or any users who want to follow along to videos and other spoken media but can’t turn up their audio. That said, at this point, its speech recognition isn’t perfect. I noticed Chrome had trouble recognizing speakers with heavy accents or poor audio quality—and Live Captions are only available for English audio at launch. However, even with those limitations, Live Captions is a welcome feature that will hopefully get better as Google continues to update its precision and add support for other languages.
