So you can activate sub titles in Google Meet video calls

During this 2020 surely you have gained some experience in this meeting from home. Teleworking has imposed video calls as a way to meet with customers, suppliers, bosses, employees or colleagues and coordinate. A good way to see each other's faces, but also to share a screen, explain concepts and strategies, close deals and more. All this, of course, if the language is not a problem. Or if the video call has cuts in sound or video due to connection issues.Well, to shed some light on this darkness that is the meetings through video calls Google brings the function of sub titles to its Google Meet tool And it's going to useful to you, so learn to use it.

How to activate sub titles in a video call

First and most importantly, this feature is only available on Google Meet. This free tool, available to everyone and also for professional spaces, where you can chat with other users by video or audio. And it is that these sub titles are achieved through another of the Google technologies well known by almost all users with Android phones: speech-to-text, or what is the same, dictation to text. The same one that you use when you compose messages in WhatsApp by pressing the microphone icon and dictating it so that everything is transcribed in a quite realistic way. So everything stays at home, within Google's own services.

Once you're in a Google Meet meeting or video call, turning on captions is really easy. You just have to click on the button with the three points in the lower right corner of the screen to display all the available options. Among them will be the section caption or sub titles Selecting the option now opens a wide variety of available languages. Until now, only people who spoke English could be sub titled. Now it is also activated in Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, and with the promise of continuing to expand these possibilities in the future.

By choosing the language in question, the Google service will recognize the words spoken by the interlocutors and transcribe them under the image of the video callWith this, if we do not hear the transmission correctly or even if our hearing capacity is not complete, we can perfectly follow the video call.With just a few seconds behind the user. Just like it happens on mobiles when something is transcribed using the Google microphone. So the experience is virtually instantaneous.

Why transcribe Google Meet video calls

Google has opted for this function with people with hearing problems in mind. In this way video calls are made accessible to anyone, even if they are deaf. Something that will help to avoid the differences that teleworking entails between people with different abilities.

But beware, using sub titles in a video call can also have other practical uses. Among them is the possibility of following the video call without having to have the audio active. Something that can avoid hearing your boss's voice, but also get rid of your computer's low-power speakersOr help you understand what you're hearing so softly if you don't have compatible headphones.

On the other hand, it is also possible to mute a video call to be able to attend to other tasks while reading, with a glance, the topic that is being discussed. Something that can avoid another of the big problems of this new current practice: the lack of productivity due to constant meetings.

Anyway, this new feature is now available for free on Google Meet for all users, professional and non-professional.