Google Meet Live Captions

Free live captions during Google Meet interviews

Google Meet's live captions remain among the most accurate options for English calls, powered by Google's speech-recognition stack. Free, built in, no setup beyond a menu toggle. They vanish when the call ends unless you capture them through Otter, ScreenApp, or Workspace's transcript feature.

Google Meet Live Captions are free and built into every Google Meet call. They toggle on from the three-dot menu during a call and produce real-time captions at the bottom of the screen using Google's underlying speech-recognition stack. Accuracy on English speech is strong, often better than competing built-in options like Zoom's, particularly on conversational tempo and accented speech. Multi-language support is growing but remains stronger in English than other languages, with several still marked preview-quality. The limitation is persistence. Google Meet does not save the caption track after the call by default. If you want a transcript or VTT file for downstream caption work, you need to record the call and capture the captions through a separate tool like Otter or ScreenApp, or use Google Workspace's transcript recording feature where available on enterprise tiers. For podcasters recording interviews on Meet, the live captions are useful as a real-time check during the call, but you should plan a separate transcript pipeline if you need captions for the published episode. There is no styling or animation — the output is accessible and functional during the call only. For accessibility coverage during meetings, this is the strongest free option; for editorial captions on a published episode, plan a downstream Whisper or YouTube pass.