Google Workspace Updates Bring More Accurate Voice Typing, Adds Automatic Live Captions for Slides

Google has started rolling out updates to its Docs and Slides app that adds improvements and a new feature. The improvements come in the form of a more accurate voice typing experience, which Google hopes will make the tool more useful for end users. Google Slides gets new automatic captions, which basically generates captions for the speaker in real time. These updates to Google Docs and Slides have already begun rolling out to Workspace users, users with personal Gmail accounts, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers. It should be available for a majority of these users in the coming weeks.

Google has been providing the voice typing (or voice commands) in its Docs and Slides apps for a while, but the new update is said to improve the experience, making it more useful. Google in its blog post claims, that the new update will help reduce common transcription errors and also bring down instances of lost audio during transcription. Google mentions that feature works best on its Chrome browser, (be it Windows or macOS but claims to have added support for “most major browsers” as well.

Google's Slides gets a new automatic captions feature that will display a speaker's words in a presentation in real time. This feature is available solely on devices with Google's Chrome browser installed and the language set to US English only (for now). Users will have to enable the automatic captions by heading to More options> Captions preferences and then toggle captions and opening and starting the presentation. Once enabled, captions will begin to appear automatically as the presenter speaks. Google claims that Slides will also contain automatically generated punctuation marks.

Both voice-enabled features will require either an inbuilt microphone or an external one. Google also recommends a quieter room or a place with reduced background noise to minimise errors. Users will also need to tweak the mic's sensitivity depending on how far they are from it when presenting.

Meanwhile, Google recently announced that it's expanding access to its Gmail end-to-end encryption feature. It brings an added layer of protection to mails and attachments. The feature was announced in 2021 and has been in a beta testing state ever since. The latest update from Google claims to have expanded this beta feature's access to client-side encryption (CSE) in Gmail on the Web, for select customers on Google Workspace Enterprise and Education plans.