Google Drive gets automatic captions for video uploads with new update

Google Drive is now rolling out a useful feature for videos you upload: automatically generated captions. It seems the new feature is widely rolled out.

The feature is available for personal Google Accounts and uses speech recognition tech to transcribe the audio. To use the feature, users should request automatic captions after uploading a video to Drive. On the other hand, for Google Workspace users, the captions are enabled automatically, unless their admins disable it.

To generate captions for a video, you can right-click on the video and then click on Manage caption tracks, and then generate automatic captions. On mobile, tap the three-dot menu on the top right, and then go for Manage caption tracks and generate automatic captions, but this has to be done when a video is already playing.

It takes some time for the request to process. Then, the automatic captions will be available in a YouTube-esque player by tapping “CC”.

Having captions is also great for searching for videos based on content, while they also improve the accessibility of media stored in Drive. For now, English is the only language that is supported, with other languages planned “in the future”.