Google is expanding its auto-generated captions feature in Drive, adding support for 27 additional languages beyond English. The update makes stored video content more accessible, inclusive, and searchable for users across Google Workspace and personal Google accounts.

Auto-generated captions help people who are deaf or hard of hearing, users in loud environments, and anyone who prefers or needs another language. They also remove the time-consuming work of manually creating captions and make it easier to find content inside videos through search.

When an eligible user uploads a video to Drive, the system automatically detects whether the audio matches one of the supported languages and generates captions.

Newly supported languages

Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Support for Chinese is coming soon.

Admin controls

The expansion is ON by default and respects existing organizational settings. Admins can manage the feature at the domain, OU, or group level:

• Generate captions automatically on upload (default)

• Allow captions, but require users to request them

• Disable caption generation entirely

End-user experience

Users in organizations where auto-generation is enabled don’t need to take any action—captions will be created on upload. Users who must request captions (including personal accounts) can do so by selecting:

Right-click video > Manage caption tracks > Add new caption tracks

Availability

The feature is available now to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers, and personal Google account users.