Chrome Live Captions in French, Spanish, German and 17 Other Languages

What languages does Chrome's Live Caption support?

Chrome's built-in Live Caption supports the following languages as of 2026: English (US, UK, Australia, India), French, Spanish (Spain, Latin America), German, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, Polish, Hindi, Indonesian, Swedish, Turkish, Danish, Norwegian, Thai, and Vietnamese.

To select a language, go to `chrome://settings/accessibility`, click 'Live Caption', and use the Language dropdown. Chrome downloads the speech recognition model for your selected language — the initial download takes 1–3 minutes and requires an internet connection. After downloading, captions process entirely on-device.

Note: Chrome's multilingual caption models are trained primarily on broadcast speech and general conversation. Academic content — lectures, conference presentations, scientific papers — contains vocabulary, phrasing, and speaking styles that differ significantly from the training data. This reduces accuracy on specialised terms, proper nouns, and cross-disciplinary content.

How do I get live captions in French in Chrome?

To enable French live captions in Chrome:

1. Open Chrome and go to `chrome://settings/accessibility`.
2. Find 'Live Caption' and ensure it's turned on.
3. Click on 'Live Caption' to expand the settings.
4. Under 'Language', select 'French (France)' or 'French (Canada)'.
5. Chrome will download the French speech recognition model (about 30–50MB).
6. Once downloaded, Chrome's caption bubble will appear in French for any French-language audio.

For French academic content — university lectures, French MOOCs on Coursera or FUN-MOOC, French podcast transcription — Chrome's French model performs well on standard spoken French but struggles with domain-specific terminology, professor names, and institutional names (Sciences Po, EHESS, CNRS).

LessonScriptor's Premium mode uses OpenAI's Whisper model for French, which was trained on a broader range of French content including academic and professional speech, and produces noticeably higher accuracy on these terms. You can also add specific terms to LessonScriptor's vocabulary dictionary — for example, adding your professor's name ensures it's always transcribed correctly.

How do I get live captions in Spanish in Chrome?

The process for Spanish is identical to French: go to `chrome://settings/accessibility` → Live Caption → Language → select 'Spanish (Spain)' or 'Spanish (Latin America)'.

Chrome distinguishes between Castilian Spanish (Spain) and Latin American Spanish, which matters for accent recognition. If you're watching content from a Spanish university, select 'Spanish (Spain)'. For Mexican, Argentinian, Colombian, or other Latin American content, select 'Spanish (Latin America)'.

For Spanish academic content, Chrome's model handles standard lecture speech well. It degrades on rapid-speech professors, regional accents (Catalan Spanish, Rioplatense), and technical vocabulary in fields like law, medicine, and engineering.

LessonScriptor's Spanish support covers both variants and uses Whisper's multilingual model, which has substantially more training data for Spanish academic content than Chrome's on-device model.

How do I get live captions in German in Chrome?

For German captions, select 'German' in Chrome's Live Caption language settings. German is one of Chrome's stronger non-English caption languages because German-language broadcast media provided substantial training data.

German-specific accuracy issues: compound nouns (Universitätsbibliothek, Forschungsschwerpunkt) are frequently split incorrectly or misrecognised. Academic institutions (Humboldt-Universität, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) are often transcribed with errors.

For German academic or professional content, LessonScriptor's vocabulary dictionary is particularly useful — you can add long compound nouns and institution names that Chrome consistently gets wrong.

How do I get live captions in Mandarin (Chinese) in Chrome?

Chrome supports both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese for Live Caption. Select 'Chinese (Simplified)' for Mainland Chinese content and 'Chinese (Traditional)' for Taiwanese or Hong Kong content.

Mandarin is technically the most challenging language for on-device speech recognition due to tonal speech and the complexity of the writing system. Chrome's Mandarin model performs adequately for standard Putonghua (standard Mandarin) from Mainland Chinese broadcast sources, but accuracy drops significantly for Taiwanese Mandarin, Cantonese-influenced Mandarin, and academic content with technical terminology.

LessonScriptor's Whisper model for Mandarin is significantly more accurate on academic and professional content — Whisper was trained on a substantially larger and more diverse Mandarin dataset than Chrome's on-device model.

Can I use Chrome live captions for language learning?

Yes. Both Chrome's built-in Live Caption and LessonScriptor are useful for language learning, but in different ways.

Chrome's built-in captions for language learning: Useful as a reading aid when watching foreign-language videos. The real-time caption bubble helps you follow along with content in French, Spanish, German, or another target language. The limitation for language learning is that the captions are read-only — you can't highlight vocabulary, add notes, or export a word list.

LessonScriptor for language learning: The editable transcript is significantly more useful for active language learning. As you watch a French video, you can highlight vocabulary you don't know, add your own translation notes in the margin, and export the annotated transcript as a vocabulary study list. The ability to pause, edit, and annotate turns passive caption-reading into active vocabulary acquisition.

For language learners, LessonScriptor's workflow is: watch the video with live captions → highlight unknown vocabulary as it appears → export the annotated transcript → paste into Anki or your flashcard app to study.

Which tool should I use for non-English live captions in Chrome?

Use Chrome's built-in Live Caption if: you need quick, temporary captions in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, or another of the 20+ supported languages; you don't need to save or export the transcript; and you're watching general-purpose content rather than academic or technical material.

Use LessonScriptor if: you're watching academic or professional content in a non-English language where accuracy on technical terms matters; you're learning a language and want to annotate vocabulary; you use headphones; or you need to export the transcript for study. LessonScriptor supports French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and Turkish.

Use Notta if: you need live captions or transcription in languages beyond what LessonScriptor supports — particularly Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, or other Southeast Asian languages where Notta has stronger coverage.

Frequently asked questions