Apple has recently released iOS 16, which includes a new accessibility feature called Live Captions. This feature is designed to transcribe every word that you can hear from your iPhone speaker or around you. It is especially helpful for those who are hard of hearing or deaf. In this article, we will discuss how to enable, disable, and customize this new feature.
Before enabling the Live Captions feature, you need to make sure that your iPhone is updated to iOS 16. Also, ensure that the default language on your iPhone is set to English US, not English India or English UK. You can change this by going to the Settings app, navigating to General, then Language and Region, adding English US, and setting it as primary.
To enable Live Captions, open the Settings app, scroll down to Accessibility, and select Live Captions Beta. Then, enable the toggle next to Live Captions at the top and in RTT. After enabling this feature, a gray bar will appear at the bottom of your screen, which starts to listen for audio. Four buttons will be visible at the top of this bar. The first button is to hide or collapse the live transcribe bar. The second one is to pause Live Captions, followed by a mic button that can be used to record any external audio to transcribe. Finally, the last button is to expand the Live Captions bar to the full screen.
As soon as you open any app, Live Captions will come into play wherever there is audio playing. Live Captions will listen for audio, and the words will be transcribed in real-time. You can customize the appearance and layout of Live Captions by going to Settings, selecting Accessibility, and tapping on Live Captions. There, you will find individual options to edit every aspect of the captions.
Live Captions can be handy for transcribing videos or shows that you may be watching. Another useful use case is to get the lyrics of a song directly while playing it. If you’re on a phone call, you can still use Live Captions, but it may or may not be accurate based on the accent of the person and how audible they are on the call. Additionally, this feature is useful during FaceTime or video calls where all the words spoken by the other person will be transcribed into the Live Captions bar.
However, if you don’t find this feature useful, you can disable it by going to the Accessibility section in the Settings app and turning off the toggle next to Live Captions Beta.
In conclusion, Live Captions is a useful new feature that can help those who are hard of hearing or deaf. With its real-time transcription of audio, it can also be useful for transcription purposes. However, it may not be accurate in certain situations. If you’re not finding it useful, it’s easy to disable it.