Back in May, Google announced the Live Captions feature. This feature was exclusively meant for the recently released Pixel and Pixel 4 XL. However, the search giant is now releasing it for the last year’s Pixel 3 and this year’s Pixel 3A.
Google Live Captions provides real-time captioning for the audio and video played on your smartphone. Except for phone and video calls, but this isn’t a surprise. After all, this could easily fit in some privacy concerns. Interestingly, Live Captions work even without an active internet connection. Moreover, all the processing is done on-device, so the captions will remain private.
Live Caption is rolling out to #pixel3 and 3A 📱. Now, more users can caption anything, including videos, podcasts and audio messages without wifi or data. #IDPWD pic.twitter.com/W5T53Y0wRc
Gizchina News of the week
— Android (@Android) December 3, 2019
This feature will be greatly appreciated and useful to the people who are deaf and hard of hearing. However, it is really useful in situations where you can’t hear the audio because of noisy surroundings. Imagine you need desperately to hear the content of a video or audio and forgot your earphones? This feature turns really useful in these situations. It’s a major step when it comes to accessibility. Hopefully, it will be integrated in future Android releases as Google is already working with Android OEMs for wider availability.
Unfortunately, the feature only supports English at the moment. Worth noting that this is just the beginning, so in the future, we can expect more language support.
