Live Caption has been one of the most underrated features on Android for years. Whether you are hard of hearing, deaf, in a noisy environment, or forget to bring your headphones, it automatically transcribes all sound coming from your phone for you. We’ve known for a long time that Live Caption is on its way to Chrome as well, and we just spotted it working on the stable version of Chrome 88 today – all you need to do is turn on a flag.

From now on, Live Caption is only available as a flag under chrome: // flags / # enable-availability-live-caption and must be activated manually. With the flag on and your browser restarted, just start any video and look for the Global Media Control menu to the right of your address bar. Here you need to activate a new Live Caption toggle (which was first spotted by Chrome Story).

Live Caption is still a bit buggy right now, and you often have to turn it on and off to make it work after pausing a video. It also doesn’t work with YouTube content on stable at all (although it does work fine on Canary). But once you get to know the current limitations and quirks of Live Caption, it works pretty well.

We can confirm that Live Caption is working on Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS, although there is no quick toggle on Chrome OS to enable the feature on the fly – you need to look for “Live Caption” in the settings of your system and activate it or there. On Chrome OS, Live Caption also only works in Chrome; it is not yet functional in Android and Linux applications.

Work on YouTube in Chrome Canary.

It’s great to see one of Android’s most innovative features making its way into more Google products, and we can only hope that Google will soon be ready to enable it for everyone by default.