Google Drive video uploads now have auto-generated captions

Google Drive is adding automatically generated captions to videos you upload. This is already widely rolled out.

Google is leveraging “speech recognition technology to transcribe the audio.” This feature is available for personal Google Accounts, but users “must request automatic captions after uploading a video to Drive.”

Google Workspace customers will have captions enabled automatically “upon video upload” unless their admins disable this feature.

To generate, right-click the Drive video > Manage caption tracks > generate automatic captions, or “three dot menu on top right > manage captions tracks > generate automatic captions” when something is already playing. 

You have to “manually request automatic captions for any video that was uploaded prior to this new update.” It takes a moment for it to process.

You can then view them in the YouTube-esque player by tapping “CC.”

Captions let you “easily search for videos based on their content, making it much simpler to find the exact file you need.”

Automatic caption generation can improve the accessibility of media stored in Drive and can save you the effort of manually creating captions.

English is supported today with other languages for automatically generated captions planned “in the future.”

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