If you enjoy watching English videos on your phone, but have trouble deciphering the accent or hearing the sounds, Google allows for captions to be added to videos playing on Android phones. Here are the steps to enabling this feature.
Turn On Live Captions
Go to the Settings page on your Android phone.
Scroll down the list of options until you get to the Accessibility section and tap on it. In some phones, the Accessibility section is found on the main Settings page, while in others it is located within the System option.
The Accessibility section is the part of the phone’s settings that controls the options designed to make the phone easier to use for people suffering some sort of a handicap, such as being unable to hear, see or use their hands properly.
On the accessibility page, search through the various options until you find the Captions tab.
Click on it, and select the “Use Captions” option by tapping the gray button next to it so the option turns blue.
The bottom half of the page carries various options to customize the style and presentation of the captions. These include:
Language: This lets you choose which language to translate the video into. Note that the meaning of the spoken words can often get muddled when getting translated into a different language.
Text Size: You can choose to have the captions show up in a range of sizes, from very small to very large.
Captions Style: This controls the look of the captions, and the colors used for the caption letters and the background for the letters.
The Google Captions feature is now active. Whenever you watch a video on your phone, live captions will be automatically added to the bottom of the screen. This feature works on videos, but it will not work on music files, or during phone calls.
Also, Google will not store information relating to your use of captions, and the feature will still work in the absence of an internet connection. Lastly, the captions will still appear onscreen even if the sound is low or muted.
You can drag the captions using your finger around on the video screen to relocate them to a point where they are less distracting, or you can remove the captions entirely from the screen on a particular video by dragging the captions to the bottom of the screen and dropping them there.
Conclusion
Google Live Captions is a useful feature to have when viewing videos in a language you are not very familiar with or are suffering from some form of hearing impairment. It uses the same technology used by Youtube to provide closed captions on a video. Some words may occasionally get garbled while translating spoken words in the video into written words in the captions field, but the end result is still a fairly reliable captioning of the dialogues.
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