Published: March 24, 2020
Google has been laser focused on captioning audio for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In February of last year, Google introduced the popular app, Live Transcribe, which captions in-person conversations, and in late 2019 Google introduced Live Caption, which captions all media content on a device.
Fortunately, Google seems committed to continuing to develop Android’s captioning capabilities. Last week, Google introduced a feature called “Transcribe” within its Google Translate app. When the user activates this feature, the app will translate and transcribe the speech for one of eight languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian or Thai. Thus, someone who is deaf or hard of hearing can now understand someone speaking in one of those languages. This feature is designed to translate and transcribe the speech of someone who is speaking for a longer period of time, such as during a lecture or meeting.
“Transcribe” is now available on the Android version of Google Translate, and will come to the iOS version of Google Translate at some unspecified time in the future.
Google also announced that Google Duo will soon caption audio and video messages. Google Duo is Google’s video and voice calling app.
Google Duo has had the capability of sending an audio or video massage for a while. However, now you can send a video message to someone who is deaf or hard of hearing and they can add captions to understand its content.
We look forward to hearing about Google’s next innovation for those with hearing loss!
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