Google Meet Live Captions

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.