Google Meet now supports captions on video recordings, the company announced on Wednesday. The live caption was only available for live meetings when translated captions were first introduced to Google Meet last January. These captions that were previously not visible in video recordings have now been expanded to include support for video recordings on the video meeting service. Using the feature would help Google Meet users overcome language barriers and disabilities when 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.
Google notes 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. This feature can also be enabled by teachers or co-teacher for meetings created through Google Classroom.
Customers with Google Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade will be able to add captions to Google Meet video recordings. Users should be able to access the feature by March 15. Rapid Release domains began receiving the feature on Wednesday, and Scheduled Release domains will begin receiving it on March 1.
The company previously rolled out the live translated captions for Google Meet in January 2022. With this feature, conversations in Google Meet will be automatically translated into another language in real-time and captions will be added to 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.