Google may bring Live Captions feature for phone calls

The Live Captions feature that Google introduced last year is one of the more interesting new things that they’ve brought to Android devices, initially with the Pixel 4 devices. One thing that it couldn’t transcribe though were voice calls. But now it looks like Google is preparing the backend to bring the feature to voice calls as well. And no, you cannot use it to secretly save transcriptions of your call since the person on the other end will be informed that you are using call captions for the call.

To do a quick review, Live Caption was created to make digital media more accessible for the hard of hearing and also for those who cannot listen to the audio at the moment for one reason or another. It automatically captions the videos and spoken audio that you come across on your phone and it does so in real-time. Even better, the captioning is done on-device so you don’t need to be connected to WiFi or cellular data for this to happen.

One limitation to it is that it didn’t work on audio and video calls. But the folks over at XDA Developersfolks over at XDA Developers saw in the Android 11 Developer Preview 3 for the Google Pixel 4 that that may change soon. There are strings indicating that users will be able to turn on Live Caption for voice calls. So far there is no indication that will happen for video calls as well, but that’s very possible too. But for now, it seems to be coming soon for audio calls first.

When you enable it during a phone call, an audio file will play, informing all parties that the call caption is turned on and that the call is being transcribed into captions. “They’ll see captions of what you say to help them listen along.” The restriction that is currently in place will probably be bypassed by a system-only permission that will be added in Android 11 Developer Preview 3.

This is of course not yet confirmed for now since it’s just an APK teardown. Privacy is probably the biggest issue that they would have to overcome. An audio file playing to inform people will probably not be enough so let’s see what other precautions they will take for this understandable barrier.

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