Google's Live Transcribe is coming to ChromeOS, five new languages supported

Google’s ChromeOS powers a sizeable portion of the world’s laptops available today, especially in the affordable device category and offers most of Google’s services on a large screen. Google keeps adding new features to ChromeOS, and a new report suggests that the Live Transcribe function that recently came to its Chrome Browser could soon arrive on Chromebooks, along with support for five more languages.

Also read: Google Chrome gets powerful ‘Live Transcribe’ accessibility feature for videos

Live Transscribe or Live Captions, is a useful feature that allows a device to automatically generate captions on a device for any media, including videos, music - even for calls. The feature was introduced on Google’s Pixel devices as an exclusive and later made its way to Android devices from manufacturers like Samsung and OnePlus. We recently reported that Google had finally launched the feature on its Chrome browser.

While it seems logical that Google would also bring the same features to its ChromeOS that powers Chromebooks, it is no secret that Google has been working on bringing live captions for content for the operating system - Android Police had spotted it in February 2020 on Google’s open-source Chromium browser’s code review website, also known as Gerrit.

While Live Transcribe is still pretty limited in terms of supporting only English captions, this could soon change, according to a recent report. It looks like Google is now planning to add support for five more languages. Android Police spotted support for French, German, Italian Japanese and Spanish on the Live Caption settings.

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The Live Transcribe feature on ChromeOS looks like its Chrome counterpart on the desktop, according to the report but it has one major difference - the toggle for ChromeOS is located on the volume slider while Chrome on the desktop includes the toggle as part of the media player controls. At the moment, it is difficult to tell when the feature will eventually roll out to all users but given how it has already launched for Chrome for desktop, it could likely be released in the coming weeks.