It’s always a welcome move when an app or software adds an accessibility feature to its offering. In this regard, Google seems to have hit the right note by incorporating the Live Captions feature in its Chrome browser.
When you enable this feature, it would automatically generate captions on the go for the concerned audio or video being played.
The benefits for the same are aplenty. First off, it would go to great lengths to help people who need a hearing aid. Likewise, it will also aid the users who prefer to watch foreign-language films.
Moreover, only a few services (such as YouTube) can create captions automatically; the rest all require your manual efforts, such as providing the SRT subtitles file.
But with the help of the Live Caption feature in Chrome, you don’t need to carry out any such task; everything will be taken care of by the browser itself.
So without further ado, let’s check out the steps to enable and disable the Chrome Live Captions on your PC right away. Follow along.
Enable Chrome Live Captions
Live caption functionality first made its way with Chrome version 85, but it was an experimental feature now. However, from version 91 onwards, it has now been added as a stable feature, and you could enable it right away.
There are two different methods, and we have shared both of them below. You may try out the one that you find easy to deal with.
Enable Live Captions via Chrome Settings
Here are the steps to enable live captions in Google Chrome via the Settings page:
- Launch Google Chrome browser.
- Click on the More
for options menu. - Select the Settings menu from the list
- Scroll to the Advanced section, and click to expand.
- Scroll down to the Accessibility section, and turn ON the Live Caption toggle.
Enable Live Captions via Global Media Controls
Here are the steps to enable the Chrome Live Caption feature from the media controls icon:
- Play any audio or video of your choice on Chrome.
It will bring up the Global Media Controls icon at the extreme right of the Taskbar. - Click on the Media control icon.
- Enable the Live Captions toggle, the feature will then become active.
Customize Chrome Live Captions
In its default state, the captions would occupy the bottom portion of your screen. Furthermore, it would be in plain white text with a black background. However, you could customize each of these aspects. Let’s check it out how:
First off, if you wish to place the captions in any other location on your screen, then just drag and drop them to the desired position.
Likewise, you could also expand by clicking on the downward arrow. This way,y you will be able to get hold of around 9-10 lines at one g instead ofo the default two.
Apart from that, there’s also the option to customize the caption’s color, transparency, style, size, and effects.
Here are the steps to customize the live caption font and background:
- Launch Google Chrome browser.
- Click on the More for options menu.
- Select the Settings menu from the list
- Scroll to the Advanced section, and click to expand.
- Scroll down to the Accessibility section and click on Captions Preferences.
It will open the Caption Preference settings page. - Customize the captions as per your liking.
You could also change the caption background color and its transparency (opaque, translucent, etc., along the same lines).
Another pretty nifty feature allows you to tweak the contrast of the other window components. This will help the captions to remain standout from other elements on your screen.
Once you have carried out the desired customizations, make sure to disable (instructions given below) and re-enable this feature for the changes to occur.
Similarly, for the MacOS user, it will open the Caption Accessibility preference page that has very similar options to customize the live captions feeds.
Disable Chrome Live Caption
If you wish to close the ongoing captions, click on the cross icon situated at the top right. However, if you prefer to turn off this feature, then refer to the below steps:
Here are the steps to disable the chrome live caption feature:
- Launch Google Chrome browser.
- Click on the More for options menu.
- Select the Settings menu from the list
- Scroll to the Advanced section, and click to expand.
- Under the Accessibility section, and turn OFF the Live Caption toggle button.
You could also turn off this feature right from the Global Media Control menu present in the address bar.
It will turn off the live caption instantly on your chrome browser.
Bottom Line: Chrome Live Caption
So with this, we round off the guide on how you could enable and disable Chrome Live Captions. Likewise, we have also listed out the steps to customize these captions as per your liking.
While no doubt this is quite a handy feature, it’s yet to be completely polished.
There were some issues that needed to be immediately addressed. First off, it seems to work and supports the English language only for now. If you seek forward or backward a video, the entire captions get distorted and generate random lines.
Once these rough edges get polished, it would be one of this browser’s most valuable features.
What are your views on the live captioning feature with Google Chrome? Do you find this feature helpful?
I am trying to stop YouTube from adding Closed Caption by default. I followed instruction regarding this, and it does not stop captioning.
Some wrote they went into Chrome and stopped Chrome from adding captioning.
You all say the same thing, except there is not a Live Caption toggle in my Chrome Version 93.0.4577.107 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Now what???
Hello George, that’s weird! The Live Caption was added in version 91. can you please screenshot it? You can use imgur to share the screenshot link. Thank you!
This is great but I don’t and won’t ever use that option and before that little icon up in the corner of my screen ends up taking up the entire screen with unwanted options, how do I remove this little musical note feature from my screeen?
Hi Jim, the audio play control icon only appears when you play any video or audio on Chrome browser, until then it’s invisible on the toolbar screen. Unfortunately, we cannot hide that icon while streaming files, it’s a core part of the Chrome browser.
Captions are great for deaf people like myself. But when trying to write down instructions on paper or a text box, there should be a way to keep the captions on the screen when I pause to make notes. Even better, a way to capture the captions in a file or copy the portion I need and paste into another file would help.
Omg thank you SO MUCH. I guess I had accidentally turned them on at some point, and I was getting so incredibly annoyed with them.
Ditto. So annoying. I never enabled this feature. IMO Chrome should have announced this feature with instructions on how to enable/disable it before merely turning it on. Instead we had to search out instructions ourselves.
Finally solved this issue with your help! Thanks so much!
Thank you for this. Live captions appeared on my computer out of the blue and I was about to toss my whole computer until I came accross this site, where you clearly explained how to turn live captions off.
When I opened SETTINGS, there were no Accessibilities at the bottom.
So, at the top, in the search box, I had to type in Accessibilities and the page expanded to control Live Captions.
I am a Korean developer. Is there a way to turn on/off the live caption function using meta tags?
Not something I’m aware of. But, please share if you found one. 🙂
I do not have the toggle option and software claims to be up to date. This is the most annoying feature they have come up with. I can close the text box, but as soon as I scroll down on whatever web page I am on, it comes back on.
that was really helpful <3