How to Turn On Captions in Google Meet (and Subtitles in Your Language)

How to turn on captions in Google Meet (computer)

1. Join the meeting on meet.google.com, as the host or as a guest.
2. Look at the bar at the bottom of the call window.
3. Click Turn on captions. The button switches to “Turn off captions”.
4. Wait for someone to speak. The captions appear as people talk, with the speaker’s name.

Prefer the keyboard? Press c to show or hide captions. Press Shift + ? in a meeting to see all of Meet’s shortcuts.

Per Google’s help page on captions, captions turn on only for you. Live captions are available to Google Workspace customers and to people with personal Google accounts, so a free account is enough.

Set the right caption language for Google Meet subtitles

Meet captions one spoken language at a time. If people speak Spanish but the captions are set to English, you get nonsense. This is the most common reason Google Meet captions look broken.

1. In the meeting, click More options.
2. Open Settings, then Captions.
3. Under Language of the meeting, choose the language people actually speak.

On a computer, Meet’s live captions list 88 languages and regional variants, and 62 of them are marked beta (source: Google). Beta languages may be less accurate.

If a meeting switches between languages, you have to change this setting yourself when the language changes.

Make Google Meet captions easier to read

Under More options → Settings → Captions → Customize your captions, Meet lets you change the font, font size, font color and background color. If the text feels small or disappears against a bright background, start there.

You can also scroll back through the captions, but only for the time you were in the meeting with captions on. If you turn them on late, earlier sentences are not there.

Alternatives: other ways to get captions or translated captions

Chrome’s Live Caption

On Windows and Mac, Chrome has its own feature: Chrome settings → Accessibility → Live Caption. It creates captions for audio in Chrome, including video calls, and processes them on your device. Its Live Translate option on the same page translates these captions (“Translate to”); for that, captions are sent to Google (source: Google).

Google’s own translated captions in Meet

If you want to translate Google Meet captions without any extension, Meet has translated captions. The path is More options → Settings → Captions → Language of the meeting → Translated captions, then pick your language. Per Google, this is available in Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus and Google AI Pro for Education, and is gradually rolling out. You can use it as a participant if the meeting is organized by a user with an eligible Workspace edition. It is not included in several other plans, such as Business Starter, Workspace Individual or Google One plans.

Clozo

If you join meetings as a guest, or your plan doesn’t include translated captions, Clozo is a third route. It is a Chrome extension that gives you Google Meet live translation as text, as described in the next section.

How Clozo turns on captions for you and translates them

Clozo does not listen to audio. It reads the captions Meet shows and has the text translated. So it needs Meet’s captions on, and it does that for you:

1. Add Clozo to Chrome from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Join a call on meet.google.com.
3. Clozo turns on Meet’s captions by itself. This is the setting “Turn on captions automatically”, which is on by default.
4. The first time, Clozo asks before anything is sent. Click “Agree and translate”. If you pick “Not now”, you see captions but nothing is translated.
5. The original and the translation appear one under the other, with the speaker’s name, about a second after each sentence ends.

You only choose the language to translate into. Clozo detects the spoken language from the caption text and, by default, translates into your browser’s language. Only you see it; other participants see nothing, and no bot joins the call.

The yellow pill in the call opens a menu. There you can show “Both” or “Translation only”, pick one of four text sizes, and place the captions at the bottom, at the top, or anywhere you drag them. Alt+Shift+T turns translation on or off. If captions look wrong, the pill menu has a help entry, “Captions in the wrong language?”, which explains how to fix Meet’s caption language.

More details are in how Clozo works and privacy in short.

Google Meet captions not working: common problems and fixes

• The captions are gibberish. The caption language doesn’t match the spoken language. Open More options → Settings → Captions and change “Language of the meeting”.
• You can’t find the button. Use the keyboard shortcut c, or look for “Turn on captions” in the bottom bar.
• Earlier sentences are missing. Meet only keeps captions from the time you were in the meeting with captions on. Turn them on as soon as you join. Clozo can also open a live transcript (“Open live transcript” in the pill menu) in Chrome’s side panel, with search and copy.
• Translated captions don’t appear in Meet’s settings. Your plan, or the organizer’s, may not include them. See the plan list above.
• Clozo shows a notice in the call. If Meet changes its page and Clozo can’t read the captions, it tells you. Clozo can receive updated page selectors as data, without an extension update.
• Translation stopped mid-call. On the free plan, Clozo translates 15 minutes a day (only minutes with speech count). Meet’s captions stay visible in the original language. With 2 minutes left you get a warning. See pricing.

Honest limits of Meet captions and Clozo

Captions are only as good as what Meet hears. Accents, crosstalk, background noise, names and jargon can all cause mistakes, and a machine translation of a mistaken caption can add more. Treat live captions as a strong help, not a perfect record.

Clozo works only in Google Meet in Chrome (version 116 or newer) on a computer. It does not work in Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Webex, in Meet’s mobile apps, or in Firefox or Safari. It translates text, not voice, and it does not record or summarize. Meet’s chat is not translated. The translation arrives about a second after a sentence ends, not word by word.

Clozo asks you to tell other participants that their captions are being translated, and not to use it in confidential meetings.

Questions and answers