Chrome has long been a favorite browser for online video and audio playback, thanks to its ability to automatically add live captions to any video or audio. Captions can be added manually by clicking the “Captions” button in the lower right corner of a video or audio player, or they can be automatically generated based on the content of a web page. To get started, open Chrome and navigate to any web page that contains video or audio content. Click the “Captions” button in the lower right corner of the player window and select either “Add Captions Manually” or “Generate Captions Automatically.” If you’re adding captions manually, you’ll first need to identify the start and end points for each captioned segment. To do this, click on the playhead at either end of a captioned segment and drag it to where you want it to start and end. Once you’ve located each captioned segment, click on it to select it and then enter your text into the text field next to it. If you’re generating captions automatically, Chrome will first search for closed-captioning (CC) files associated with your web page. If it finds any CC files, Chrome will use those as its source for generating captions. Otherwise, Chrome will use default English captions provided by YouTube/Google+. You can modify these default captions by clicking on the “Edit Captions” button next to each one and entering your own text into the text field that appears. Once you’ve entered your captioning information, click on the “OK” button in the lower right corner of the player window to save your changes and close out of Caption Maker mode. You’re now ready to enjoy your videos or audio with live captions! ..
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
