A few days ago Microsoft announced the latest Insider version of Windows 11and it is one that came loaded with important new features that will not only solve several of the initial shortcomings of the system, but will also add a few new things.
One such novelty is what the company has called “live subtitles“, an automatic captioning feature for audio and video that you play anywhere in Windows 11. We’ve tested them to see how well they work, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised.
No more downloading subtitles or searching for song lyrics?
No. At least for now, live subtitles in Windows 11 have a lot of room for improvement in speech recognition, but that’s not to say that in the future they won’t be as good as Windows voice dictation, which ranges from wonders.
Windows 11 automatic subtitles are currently available in Englishbut they will obviously support more languages in the future, and most likely sooner rather than later by the time the feature is released in the stable version of the system.
They can be activated at any time by pressing the key combination CTRL + Windows Key + L. Whether you’re watching something on YouTube from the browser, playing a video from VLC, a podcast on Spotify, or listening to music from Windows Media Player, live subtitles will try to figure out what it sounds like and display it instantly.
When you press the keyboard shortcut, by default a black box appears with the subtitles at the top that you can move down, or leave it floating anywhere from the desk. On one side you find a settings button and a help button.
You can also find the function from the Setting in the section of Accessibility. There you can also find options to change the style of the subtitles between four different ones. Microsoft says that turning on live captions downloads the language files. The data is processed locally and is not shared with the cloud.
In our tests it has done quite well both watching local videos and from YouTube in the browser. Maybe you get some words wrong about 20% of the time. Now when it’s just audio, especially music, it tends to be much more inaccurate. Either way, it’s a great accessibility feature that Microsoft will surely fine-tune a lot over time.