Listening to the Mac Admins Podcast with automatic live captions

Hey y'all. As some of you may or may not know, I am one of the team members of the Mac Admins Podcast. I am periodically on the pod but I'm mainly the person sharing episodes across our social media accounts and sharing interesting articles and news on the Mac Admins Podcast account.

Something I've been putting a lot of thought into, but haven't quite figured out a solution for, is some kind of transcription service for the podcast. We all have full-time jobs outside of the podcast and even using a somewhat sophisticated transcription tool requires copy-editing which is something we don't really have the time for. I know imperfect is better than nothing but I want to make sure whatever option we choose is the best option… and I'm feeling a bit commitment-shy about it.

That all being said, I did stumble across one way to listen to the Mac Admins podcast with live captions and thought I'd share that here for those that might benefit. All you need is Google Chrome on major version 90 or later. Here are the release notes for version 90 when live captions first shipped. 

Screenshot of the Mac Admins Podcast Tumblr account with Chrome's live caption feature enabled.

To enable live captions in Google Chrome, head to chrome://settings/accessibility and enable the live captions options there.

Screenshot of the Accessibility settings page in Chrome with Live Caption enabled.

Once enabled you can listen to episodes of the podcast in the browser window on the Mac Admins Podcast website or Tumblr, the Spotify web player, or any other podcast service that serves podcast episodes and has a web player. Live captions will appear at the bottom of the screen and can be expanded for a larger view if you need it.

If you work for an organization that would like to sponsor transcriptions of the Mac Admins Podcast please reach out. We'd love to work with you.