Microsoft adds more languages to Windows 11’s live captions feature

The live captions feature was first released in September last year, but only provided captions in English, with a focus on English (United States), the tech giant said in a blogpost on Wednesday.

San Francisco: Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it is releasing “Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25300” to the Dev Channel, which includes more languages support for Windows 11’s live captions feature.

The live captions feature was first released in September last year, but only provided captions in English, with a focus on English (United States), the tech giant said in a blogpost on Wednesday.

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“In this build, live captions gains the ability to also provide captions in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish and other English dialects.”

Moreover, the company will add more languages as they become available.
Live captions can be turned on with the WIN + Ctrl + L keyboard shortcut, or from the quick settings accessibility flyout via Quick Settings.

Live captions will prompt users to download the necessary speech recognition support when users turn them on for the first time, in order to allow on-device captioning.

If speech recognition support is not available in the users’ preferred Windows language or if they want support in other languages, they will be able to download speech recognition support for live captions by navigating to Settings > Time & Language > Language & region.

The company is also trying out “different treatments for snap layouts” with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel.

“We are investigating ways to improve the discoverability and usage of the snap layouts such as decreasing the hover time required to invoke the flyout when you mouse over the maximum/restore button in an app’s title bar,” the tech giant said.