How to Use Live Caption on Android to Read Audio as Text

Live Caption is a built-in accessibility feature on Android phones that automatically transcribes spoken audio into on-screen text. It works with videos, podcasts, phone calls, audio messages, and almost any app that plays sound. The captions appear as a dark text box at the bottom of your screen that you can move, expand, or minimize.

One of the most important things about Live Caption is that it works completely offline. The speech recognition happens on your phone itself — your audio is never sent to Google's servers. This makes it both fast and private. You can use it without a cellular connection or Wi-Fi.

Live Caption is available on Google Pixel phones starting with the Pixel 3 (running Android 10 or later) and has expanded to many other Android phones including Samsung, OnePlus, and other brands on Android 11 and later. Not all Android phones have this feature — the availability depends on the manufacturer including it.

There are two ways to turn on Live Caption. The fastest way is to press a volume button on the side of your phone. When the volume slider appears on screen, look for a small caption icon (two lines of text) below the slider. Tap it to enable or disable Live Caption. The second way is through Settings — go to Settings, tap Accessibility, then Live Caption, and toggle it on from there.

Once turned on, the caption box appears automatically whenever your phone plays audio with speech. You do not need to do anything — it starts captioning on its own. If you are watching a YouTube video, listening to a podcast, or playing a voice message, the words appear as text in real time at the bottom of your screen.

You can drag the caption box to any position on your screen by pressing and holding it, then dragging. Tapping the expand arrow makes the box larger so more text is visible at once. Tapping the collapse arrow shrinks it back down.

Live Caption can also work during phone calls on supported Pixel devices, though this feature may not be available on all Android brands. For phone calls specifically, the captioning applies to what the other person is saying — not your own voice.