Google has announced that live translated captions during video calls are now available widely to more Google Meet users. Real-time video call transcripts first arrived for Hangouts Meet in 2019, a product that has now been folded in favor of Google Meet. Then in December of 2020, Google added support for transcriptions in more languages than just English, bringing support for French, Spanish, Portuguese and German into the mix.

The most natural evolution from this stage was somehow adding translation capability to live transcriptions on Google Meet. That finally happened in September last year, with Google announcing that live translated captions will be available for beta testing for the languages mentioned above. However, it was not open to all users because only accounts with Google Workspace Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus and Teaching & Learning Upgrade subscription tier could access it.

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Well, the beta testing phase is finally opening widely. Live translated captions on Google Meet are now available without the requirement for beta testing registration. Google hasn't added any new languages, though, as live caption translation is still limited to French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German languages only. Moreover, not all tiers of Google's Workspace service are getting support for it. At least not just yet. Only Google Workspace Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Google Workspace for Education Plus customers can access it. The rollout of live translated captions has already begun, and it will start appearing for all eligible users within the next couple of weeks.

How To See Live Translated Captions?

Google Meet Live Translated Captions

Thankfully, enabling live translated captions doesn't require any admin-level privileges. To enable it on desktop, open Google Meet, click on the three-dot menu icon and go to the Settings section, click on Captions, and then enable the Translated captions option. Once there, select from among the four language options available viz. French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. For folks using Google Meet on mobile, open the app and follow this path: Settings > Captions > Live Captions > Translation Language. Users who already registered for the beta program months ago don't need to take any extra measures.

Plus, not all meeting participants are required to enable the feature to see live translated captions. For example, suppose the video call has been initiated by a person with the eligible Workspace subscription and enabled it on their end. Then, live translated captions will appear to everyone in the Google Meet video call. However, if the call organizer hasn't enabled it and a participant needs to see translated captions in real-time, they will need to enable it on their own end. "Translated captions help make Google Meet video calls more inclusive and collaborative by removing language proficiency barriers," says Google.

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Source: Google Workspace Blog