Google introduced a new accessibility feature called Live Captions with Android 10. The feature essentially transcribed speech in any media playing on your device with a single tap, making it easier for the hearing impaired to watch videos, podcasts, read audio messages, and more. With the launch of the Google Pixel 4a earlier this year, Google introduced Live Caption support in phone calls, and this new functionality is now also available on older Pixel devices. Along with media and phone calls, Live Caption also works on apps like Google Meet. However, the app currently supports live video captions in English only. But an APK teardown of Google Meet reveals that the app may soon support Live Captions in more languages.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
A teardown of the latest version of Google Meet has revealed new strings of code, which suggest that the company is working on adding Live Caption support for French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese to the app.
<string name="conference_captions_ftu_dialog_got_it">Got it</string>
<string name="conference_captions_ftu_dialog_settings">Settings</string>
<string name="conference_captions_ftu_message">Your captions language is set to <b>{current_captions_language}</b>. You can change this in <b>Settings</b>.</string>
<string name="conference_captions_ftu_title">Captions are now in more languages</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_picker_dialog_cancel">Cancel</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_picker_dialog_save">Save</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_picker_message">Select the language people will use in your meetings. Captions will be shown in that language for all your meetings on this device.</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_english">English</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_french">French</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_german">German</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_mexico_spanish">Spanish (Mexico)</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_portuguese">Portuguese</string>
<string name="conference_captions_language_spain_spanish">Spanish (Spain)</string>
As you can see in the strings above, Google Meet will soon present users with a new option in the app settings to help them select a different language for Live Captions. Once the feature rolls out, the app will alert users of this new functionality with a message that states: "Captions are now in more languages." Users will then be able to head over to the app settings and select a different language for captions. The description for this new setting reads as follows: "Select the language people will use in your meetings. Captions will be shown in that language for all your meetings on this device."
The code further reveals that the new Live Caption language settings will include support for four languages, including French, German, Spanish (Mexico/Spain), and Portuguese. As of now, the additional language support isn't live for users in the latest version of Google Meet. We'll update this post as soon as it rolls out with a future update. A couple of hours after this post was published, Google announced these changes to live captioning in Meet. You can read about this announcement here.