Google Meet's latest beta feature could help make video conferences with foreign clients, partners, students and employees go more smoothly. The tech giant has started testing live translated captions for the program, which is a step up from Meet's standard live captions. It will initially support meetings conducted in English that it can translate into Spanish, French, Portuguese and German.
In addition, the feature's current iteration is only available for meetings organized by Google Workspace Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus and Teaching & Learning Upgrade users. Interested administrators will have to apply for access before the feature appears in their meetings. To enable it, users will have to switch on Captions in Settings and set it to English before toggling on Translated Captions underneath. They can then choose one of the translated language options.
"Translated captions helps Google Meet video calls to be more global, inclusive and effective by removing language ability as a barrier to collaboration. By helping users consume the content in a preferred language, you can help equalize information sharing, learning, and collaboration, and make sure your meetings are as effective as possible," Google wrote in its announcement.
The tech giant didn't say whether it's working on providing translations for meetings conducted in Spanish, French, Portuguese and German instead. It also didn't mention a timeline for when the feature will become more widely available — we'll just have to wait for more announcements in the future.