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Google will soon unlock the ability to resize Android live captions. The search giant is adding a new feature called “Grab bar”, which will let users control the number of lines of text in “Live Captions”.
What is Grab Bar and how will it allow users to resize Android live captions?
Live Captions is one of the best Accessibility features of the Android OS. As the name implies, the feature automatically generates captions, in real-time.
Live Captions can transcribe any speech inside any audio the Android OS detects. Simply put, the feature is similar to the auto-generated subtitles available on YouTube.
While Live Captions is primarily intended for people with hearing issues, it can be useful for all Android device users. The auto-generated Live Captions can help users understand what’s being said while keeping the volume low.
Any Android device that supports Live Captions, shows the captions in a floating box. Currently, users cannot resize this floating box, which means they cannot vary the number of lines of text.
Google's Live Captions feature will soon add a grab bar that you can drag to quickly resize the window. This will let you increase the number of caption lines that are shown.
More details👇https://t.co/rqTmmVdmfU
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) May 29, 2024
At this year’s Google I/O, the search giant discussed several new accessibility features that would gradually roll out to Android. One of these features is called the “Grab bar”.
The new grab bar will allow users to “easily change the number of lines shown for captions,” Google has indicated. The as-yet-unreleased feature would have a system-wide impact.
Live Captions is already available across the Android OS on all supporting devices. By extension, the Grab bar will also be accessible across multimedia apps.
When will Google release the new Accessibility features for Android?
Depending on the size of the text, Live Captions can currently show two or three lines. Reducing the size of the text allows users to cram in more auto-generated captions.
The new Grab bar feature could allow users to show several more lines of text. Users need not activate “caption preferences” in settings and override the text size to a smaller value just to get more lines of text.
Besides the Grab bar feature, Live Captions could reportedly get multiple new features. There’s a toggle for showing emoji icons, emphasizing emotional intensity, including emotional tags, and showing the word duration effect.
Google had recently indicated several new Accessibility features would start rolling out this month. However, the company appears to be taking it slow.