Google Meet has been updated with support for captions on video recordings, the company announced on Wednesday. The translated caption feature to Google Meet was first rolled out in January last year, but it was limited to live meetings. These captions would not be visible in video recordings. Google has now expanded the feature to include support for video recordings on the video meeting service. The feature could help Google Meet users overcome language barriers and disabilities while accessing recorded meetings.
According to a blog post by Google, users will soon be allowed to include captions in meeting recordings. The update is expected to make recordings more useful and accessible for meeting participants.
It is worth noting that the feature can only be enabled by a Workspace admin and only the meeting host or co-host can record the meeting with captions, according to Google. This feature can also be enabled by teachers or co-teacher for meetings created through Google Classroom.
Google says that ability to add captions to the Google Meet) video recordings will be available for Google Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, the Teaching, and Learning Upgrade customers. The feature started rolling out to Rapid Release domains on Wednesday, and will begin rolling out to Scheduled Release domains on March 1 and should be available to users by March 15.
The company previously rolled out the live translated captions for Google Meet in January 2022. The feature automatically translates conversations from one spoken language to another in real-time on Google Meet and adds captions for participants as they speak.
Currently, users can view captions in Dutch (beta), English, French, German, Italian (beta), Japanese (beta), Korean (beta), Mandarin (Traditional) (coming soon), Portuguese (beta), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian (beta), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain).
The captions appear at the bottom of the screen during a Google Meet video call. Google Meet participants can see an option to turn on or off captions available at the bottom. They can also change the language of the captions by heading to the menu and clicking on Captions, selecting a language and clicking Apply.