Google is Bringing Live Translate Captions to Chrome

Google is Bringing Live Translate Captions to Chrome

Google Chrome’s Live Translate feature is currently being evaluated for desktop, following its success on Pixel devices. The feature will offer real-time machine translation of Live Captions, making it easier for people with language barriers to access content online. Currently, the feature is confined to just a handful of languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, and Italian, but users can translate them into other languages. However, translation mistakes could still lead to misunderstandings.

Chrome Canary (v114) is testing additional accessibility capabilities in addition to Live Translate. A new user interface for controlling downloaded language packs for the caption engine is one of them. New checkboxes for adding language packs and a trash can icon for quick deletion are two examples of the cosmetic changes.

With a new drop-down for Live Caption language option and a toggle for pre-selected Live Translate language, Chrome’s global media controls have been modified in Canary v114.

Overall, these new capabilities could improve accessibility for those with disabilities and linguistic challenges on Chrome for desktop. Keep checking back to learn when these features will be accessible to everyone as they are currently being tested in Chrome Canary and may not be widely implemented in the stable channel for a few months.

There are currently only a few accessibility settings available on Chrome 112. Google’s experimental Live Translate feature joins Live Captions in Chrome Canary (v114). Google is reportedly altering the user interface for controlling downloaded language packs for the caption engine, according to Chrome feature researcher Leopeva64-2 on Reddit.

However, this is the first time we’ve seen the new UI in use. Leopeva64 had posted about the anticipated live translation capability in November and October of last year. From their post, it appears that there are five language packs in addition to English that can be selected, including French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. As long as their original language is included in the list of supported languages, users should be able to translate the audio of any of those six languages into their own. There is clearly room for this capability to develop going forward since the business increased the number of Google Translate languages after last year’s Google I/O to 133.

Since at least 2020, Google has been working on live translation. We’ve been impatiently waiting for the Live Translate function to appear in the Chrome browser for the past two long years since the firm initially debuted it with the Google Pixel 6 back in 2021. The Live Translate language selection process for Pixel phones is similar to that of this beta version of the user interface. Although it only supports the same six languages for translating audio or video, the mobile version has been modified since its first release and now supports 22 languages for automatic conversation translation.

One of the best applications for wearable technology may be automatic translation services. Although there is no concrete information on when the long-dead Google Glass will actually make a comeback, Google has previously guaranteed that its still-conceptual AR glasses will be able to live translate speech. A similar live translation programme recently appeared to be operating on prototype augmented reality glasses. With these use cases, Google can perhaps soon add even more vocabularies to its audio language translation capabilities.

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