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Google Classroom Captions & AI Subtitles for Students

Google Classroom is the daily homepage for tens of millions of K-12 students and a growing share of higher-education courses. Yet captioning across Classroom is patchwork: attached videos may have YouTube auto-captions of variable quality, embedded explainer videos from third-party publishers may have none, and Google Meet sessions launched from inside Classroom rely on Meet's own captioning, which lags for many languages. For deaf and hard-of-hearing students, ELL (English Language Learner) students, and any student in a noisy household, that patchwork makes consistent classwork hard. Google Classroom captions via Live Subtitles deliver a single consistent caption layer across every audio surface in Classroom — on the student's own Windows device, with no Workspace admin approval needed.

How to add live captions to Google Classroom in 3 steps

1. Download Live Subtitles from the Microsoft Store on the student's Windows PC.
2. Select "System Audio" — captures Classroom lesson audio, attached videos, and Meet sessions.
3. Open the Classroom assignment — captions appear in a floating overlay beside the browser window.

Built for ELL and multilingual classrooms

Schools across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and beyond serve a growing population of English Language Learner students whose home languages include Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Russian, Ukrainian, Somali, and Portuguese. The traditional accommodation — a bilingual classroom aide — is expensive and unevenly available. Live Subtitles' dual subtitle mode gives the same student real-time bilingual support on every lesson: the teacher's original English appears on the top line and the student's home language below, automatically.

Strong fits include:

• K-12 ELL students in mainstream English-medium classrooms.
• Newly arrived refugee or immigrant students still building English fluency.
• International students in US/UK universities taking lecture courses online.
• Bilingual programs where instruction switches between two languages.

Accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing students

For students with hearing loss, captioning is not a convenience — it is a legal accommodation under IDEA in the US and equivalent special-education frameworks elsewhere. Where the school has not been able to caption every video and every live session, Live Subtitles provides a reliable on-device alternative. Because it captions everything that produces audio on the student's PC, parents and IEP coordinators do not need to verify caption availability lesson by lesson; the captioning layer is always on.

Captions for Google Meet sessions launched from Classroom

Many teachers run synchronous lessons through Meet sessions started directly from Classroom. Meet's native captions are improving, but caption quality and language support vary by classroom plan. Live Subtitles captions the Meet session identically to any other audio source — and unlike Meet's native captions, the dual-subtitle translation runs in 50+ target languages, supports breakout rooms, and continues working in Meet recordings played back later.

Easy for parents to install on family devices

Live Subtitles is a standard Microsoft Store app — the same install workflow parents already know for any Windows app. There is no Workspace admin approval, no Google permission, and no extension to add to the student's Google account. For school-issued 1:1 Windows devices, IT can deploy it through the Microsoft Store for Education like any other approved educational tool. Supported recognition and translation languages include English, Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Ukrainian, Hindi, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Polish, German, Italian, and 35+ more.

Download Live Subtitles — Free Trial

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