The first time I was invited into a Google Meet conference, the captions were on by default. I was impressed at how well it was doing in real time. I've seen closed captions with hired human operators during live events that didn't do as well as what I was seeing. Watching the captions disappear as the backspace was used to make a correction has always made live captions so human to me.

I think Google has the best speech to text technology in the world right now.

It’s anecdotal but Google probably has a ton of speech to text data from YouTube captions and such. Their hangouts captioning was phenomenal. I have full hearing but I still switch it on. It’s really good.

Don't forget that their CAPTCHAs for the visually impaired use YouTube audio, so they're building a very accurate, human-trained closed-captioning library.

But it assumes single language and miserably fails on mixed language content.

Including technical dialect English

One thing that might help you is the Google Recorder app. It has live speech to text and you can prop your phone next to your laptop running Zoom. It's not ideal but can help make the meeting a bit easier to follow.

Can confirm... a phone running Google's Live Transcribe propped up next to my laptop is even better for me than Google Meets captions because you can see the history. Will have to try Google Recorder.

I use hearing aids and there is still a bug in Microsoft Teams when you connect via Bluetooth. The ring tone is super loud despite adjusting volume. Other people have complained months back and it still is not resolved. Fortunately my hearing is good enough that I can put headphones on top of my hearing aids to avoid this problem.

I have this problem with Bose SoundSport headphones and FaceTime Audio. The ring and answer tones are often painfully loud. Over three years and several firmware updates, it's still not fixed.

I think Bose has become unable to focus on user experience. This is shown by: 1) their decision to remove physical buttons, 2) ignoring counterfeit products sold on Amazon, and 3) failing to make their $350 bluetooth headphones pause music when you take them off.

I take the last point as a feature. I don't want the music to stop when I put the headset on my shoulders.

Totally. I would say: pausing is the sort of feature that shouldn't be added without a user having to explicitly activate it

I work with a very international team and multiple people have accents too thick to understand. I've found that Teams and Google Meet understand them better than I do. The captioning is a godsend.

I Need to try this.

My treat is half Indian, I always feel bad but I flat out can’t follow them.

Don't feel bad! I have a thick accent when speaking English and have had colleagues ask me to try to annunciate better since they cannot understand me.

I know it's my job to communicate clearly so I make the effort to try to speak in a way that can be better understood by my team. I know my team are making an effort to understand me too.

I appreciate being told that I cannot be understood because it shows my team want to understand me and want me to be understood.

If your team can get past the sometimes awkward moment where you have to say "sorry; I didn't understand that", I'm sure they'll apreciate it too.

Hi GEBBL, I'm the Principal Lead Program Manager behind live captions in Microsoft Teams. My team and I envisioned live captions for meetings and delivered in Microsoft Teams worldwide in Dec'19. We had built it to improve inclusivity because we saw a rise in remote meetings (we couldn't have predicted COVID). We are super glad and grateful to hear that live captions have been extremely helpful and useful to you. Thank you for choosing us. Please don't hesitate to share any further feedback or comments. Regards, Shalendra

One of my friends joined a foreign multinational and basically survives by the captions as well. Good guy Microsoft

If you're ever forced into using Zoom, it's possible to add captions: https://webcaptioner.com/help/integrations/zoom

Hmm, about a year ago when I was on Zoom meetings we could get a transcript that was generated of the whole meeting, along with a recording of the meeting.

Was this feature removed at some point? One of my coworkers would export the meeting conversation and save it in slack. While it wasn't always perfect with the captioning, it worked well enough!

Transcript and captions are different

Captions are real time anD allow at least some element of inclusive participation.

A transcript is not really accessible

Ah! Thanks for the distinction! I couldn't remember if the transcription was happening in real time during the call, or if we just exported it afterwards. I hope the Zoom team adds real time soon!

That's fantastic and eye-opening. I imagine the next leap will be language translation and with that. The prospect of having support calls with anybody irrespective of language barriers is getting within reach.

We're getting really close already. I often watch non-English language videos on Youtube and the to-english translations are good enough for most things.

I think for technical conversations, too much is lost to nuance though.

> I’ve found Microsoft teams vital for me as it has auto captions enabled.

Folks at my work also appreciate this feature.

It brings up a concern I have. Our voices are then automatically sent to Microsoft for transcription? I do not see how this feature is controlled.

Are you concerned about privacy on a video chat platform?

I don’t use video at work, and this is not giving my company my own voice recording, but Microsoft.

> Are you concerned about privacy on a video chat platform?

Is this some kind of cynical belittling sarcasm?

> Is this some kind of cynical belittling sarcasm?

It looks like a legitimate question to me. One you didn't actually answer.

Are you concerned about privacy when using video chat? If so, which part? Voice, video, transcript, etc.?

I'm also interested. I assume - from a personal point of view - that the data is being stored and could be leaked, but I'm happy to accept that risk in exchange for the benefit the service provides. I've not really considered the corporate side of things though.

I hope this FAQ answers your questions and alleviates your concerns

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions...