Google Meet captions on a Mac

Captions are subtitles for a live meeting: they appear at the bottom of the call, a few lines at a time, and scroll out of view as the conversation moves on. They are not a recording and they are not notes. That distinction is the whole reason people are disappointed after the call.

Turn captions on

1. Join the meeting in a browser on your Mac.
2. Press the C key. Meet toggles captions with that single key during a call, which is faster than hunting for the control.
3. If you prefer the button: open the meeting controls and click the closed-captions (CC) control.
4. To change the spoken language, open the captions settings from the same control. Meet transcribes one language at a time, so a bilingual meeting needs the setting changed mid-call.

Captions are a per-viewer setting. Turning them on affects your screen only. Nobody else in the meeting sees them and nobody is notified.

The thing to know before the meeting: captions are not a transcript

A saved transcript is a separate Meet feature. It writes a document to the organiser's Drive and it is available only on certain Google Workspace editions, which means it may simply not be an option on your account. Captions leave nothing behind at all.

• Check whether transcripts are available on your account before the meeting starts, not after. There is no way to recover caption text once the call ends.
• If a transcript is available, someone has to start it during the call. It does not run automatically.
• Translated captions are a further separate feature with its own availability rules.

Taking notes in a call, without typing over people

Keyboard noise in a meeting is audible to everyone. Dictating is quieter, but only if you mute first, and Meet keeps your microphone live exactly the way Zoom does.

1. Mute yourself in Meet before dictating anything. Command+D toggles your microphone during a call.
2. Put your notes document in a second window rather than a second tab. Meet's caption and control keys are single letters, so a stray keystroke in the Meet tab toggles features mid-call.
3. Dictate one line at a time during natural pauses, not a running commentary.
4. Unmute before you speak to the room.

If captions do not appear

• Captions run on Meet's side, so they do not depend on your microphone permission. If they do not show for you, the account or the meeting type is the constraint.
• Captions transcribe the meeting audio, not your microphone. If you are the only person talking and nothing appears, the problem is the meeting, not your setup.
• If your own dictation is what is failing: dictation not working on Mac.

Notes that stay on your machine

Meeting notes are usually the most sensitive text anyone writes in a day, and a caption stream is Google's. A hold-to-dictate hotkey with the model running on your Mac puts the notes into your own document with nothing uploaded: voice typing for Mac.

Keep going

• Dictation in Zoom (mute before you dictate, and the chat send key)
• Dictating meeting notes into Notion

Sources

• Google Meet Help: Use captions in Google Meet
• Google Workspace Help: Use transcripts in Google Meet
• Google Meet Help: Use translated captions