Among the many Assistant announcements at Google I/O 2019, perhaps some of the most heart-warming came from the new accessibility features. One of those, built for the many who are deaf or are otherwise hard of hearing, is called Live Caption, a captioning service that displays a transcript of what’s said in a video, a video call, or even an Instagram story in real-time.
Built in collaboration with the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and coming later this year, Live Caption automatically captions media playing on your phone. #io19 pic.twitter.com/WhzwPuJWD0
— Google (@Google) May 7, 2019
From the demo, we saw a lot of applications. Whether it’s helping deaf people understand a YouTube video, a podcast, or chatting in Duo, Live Caption works with Live Transcribe looks to help include those who might be left out of engaging with content or other people digitally. It works completely on your device without the need for internet, takes up just 80MB of space, and is activated with a simple button from the volume menu.
If it has audio, now it can have captions. Live Caption automatically captions media playing on your phone. Videos, podcasts and audio messages, across any app—even stuff you record yourself. #io19 pic.twitter.com/XAW3Ii4xxy
— Google (@Google) May 7, 2019
#Android is the first OS to provide captions for almost every app on your ?. Learn how Live Caption opens up a new ? of experiences. #io19 pic.twitter.com/Ye3jIkO98G
— Android (@Android) May 8, 2019
Update 1: 2019/05/10 12:39pm PDT by Stephen Schenck
Live Caption sounds pretty impressive, sure, but pulling off a feat like this doesn’t come for free — and we’re talking specifically about the computational cost. The sort of processing power needed to generate real-time captions means that the debut of Live Caption will be limited to higher-end Android models.
Google’s Brian Kemler recently confirmed this limitation, noting that when we see Live Caption debut later in 2019 it will only be available on phones equipped with the proper resources — and beyond just needed a fast enough device, the feature also has significant storage and memory requirements.
We don’t yet know exactly how restrictive those issues are going to pose, as Google hasn’t revealed anything like minimum specs for Live Caption, but it sounds like more details should be arriving in the months to come.
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