 So there are many reasons why Captions would be a good idea for many different people. It really doesn't matter what your situation is sometimes captions just can be downright useful and for other people they're actually very necessary and the problem with that is that captions and Transcripts are really hard to do now There are services out there that will take a YouTube video and Transcribe it and make you captions and stuff like that and YouTube has its auto caption service that you that usually shows up on videos Eventually, but the problem is that they're either mediocre or really really expensive and You know, it's kind of a hit or miss kind of thing, right? So when I heard that there was a live captioning Application for Linux. I was pretty excited because this is kind of cool now as I read up about live captions, which you can download from flat hub I Became a little bit less enthused because it says right on their github page that it's not perfect, right? And I can understand that live captioning is hard Now if you own an Android phone specifically if you own a pixel phone You'll know that Google does the best live captions of anything because it does has all this Gigantic pool of data and they use that for all of their stuff and evil obviously So Google tends to do the best live captioning, but live captions for Linux is free and open source And despite not being perfect as we'll see here in a minute. It does a pretty damn good job So let's take a look at live captions for Linux now first installation was very simple all you have to do is is install it via flat hub through flat pack and It was just a one line Installation it worked really well upon first launch It will benchmark your system because it does look for minimum requirements from your CPU It runs on fairly old hardware like first generation Ryzen and the steam deck will run it and stuff like that So as long as you have fairly modern hardware, it should run just fine But it will do a preliminary check to find out if it will work So let me load up a video and then load up live captions and we'll see what this looks like So here we have one of my videos. So I'm just gonna use one of my videos So I don't have to worry about you know copyright infringement can't copyright infringement my own self So what you do here is once you have installed you can actually just launch live captions like so so live captions is just literally called live captions and It prevents you presents you a black screen. That's going to type out everything you're saying into the microphone And it just picks up system audio Either input or output. So eventually when I play this video, I'm going to have to be quiet now comma Yeah, see doesn't actually work. I thought maybe okay Maybe it'll actually type a comment in there, but it actually doesn't so as you can see Grammar is not its first priority. So there are no periods. There are no commas I wonder what it would do if I'd said something possessive. So That is Katie's bike. It does possessive just fine. Okay, so let me show you what it does on output So this is I was really taking audio from my microphone What does it do when you're listening to a video, which is probably where you'd actually see it in action? When your computer started up, you'd hear a sound when you did something wrong on your computer It'd make a sound at you when you shut down. It would make a sound you get the idea There were actual computer sounds that happened when you did stuff on your operating system Now, maybe this is just me being an old guy, which is you know true But in the past you'd hear all these sounds and added character to your user experience I know everybody's thinking Matt. This is not an important topic and it's not you're right Okay, so as you can see It doesn't do a very good job of switching sources So It's not actually picking my microphone I'm now because it's listening for output and it doesn't do a good job of switching automatically from what I can tell I'd have to hit this button here and it switches to a different Input or output so it also isn't perfect, obviously as I said before It really does not do a very good job with names. So if I said my name Matt Yeah, that's not how you spell Matt, bro. That's not even close. That's I don't you don't walk on me That's Matt with two T's yet. I got the T's part right. Anyways, I did it They got the T's part right once and not the second or third time Interestingly, it does filter out filler words. So if I said um, I well filtered it out one time it didn't filter out another time um and It did at that time so it like it listens for natural flow if it thinks it's a filler word Or if you're actually meaning to say the word um, it will put it in there But if you just say um, I don't know. Oh, I did pick it up that time So it's a little bit inconsistent, right? But the idea here isn't that it's perfect It's that it does offer a service that can give you At least some form of live captioning as something is going on on your computer So where this could be useful is where live or regular close captioning isn't available So for example, if you're watching a live stream of something where you're on YouTube and your favorite YouTubers live streaming maybe during the Linux cast live every Saturdays at three o'clock p.m. Eastern time And you want some form of live captioning you could have this running in the background And it would give you at least some form of close captioning during a live event now. Obviously Again, it's not perfect grammar is not here. It doesn't do a very good job Good job with names So let's see if it says I'm gonna say Tyler It did Tyler fine. What about Steve? It did Steve fine. How about Matt? Still not smelling that right, bro. I Don't it's not that hard. Come on, man. All right. Anyways, I guess I'm just gonna have to change my name Because this is how it's supposed to be still anyway So you get the idea, right? There's not much to this application and it's not perfect, but it does a fairly good job Now I didn't notice that it tends to Not like the word KDE Yeah, that's what it was doing when I first tested this it said instead of like let's just say I MHO Yeah, so in my honest opinion would be a an abbreviation or ASAP It did ASAP just fine because that's more broadly known. What about etc. It's gonna actually yeah It actually abbreviated, etc. It didn't spell it out. I wonder if you wanted it to spell out, etc No, no, it's just going to use the abbreviation. I didn't consistencies would drive me kind of nuts here but things like KDE which you spell out it sometimes spell cat with K sometimes it spells Katie Which is not what I'm saying KDE II It's really weird It's not probably meant for people talking into a microphone and watching it saying what that's not what I actually said bro I don't know why I'm calling it bro so much, but I'm just assuming Anyways live captions as actually pretty cool. I've been messing around with it now for an hour and I've had fun just watching my voice show up in text even though About 10% of the time it doesn't get it exactly, right? What I would like to see them work on is obviously Get better at recognizing what is being said but really They're 90 to 95% of the way there. It's really really good I just wish they did better on grammar if they could do Grammar to the point where when it knows I'm at at the end of a sentence It would put a period period Period, but it just spells it out right Or you know if it knew that the sentence needed a comma or a semicolon or whatever if it got better at grammar this thing would be phenomenal and I think it's already kind of Phenomenal in and of itself as it is right now, but I really do wish it was just a little bit more So I hope that they continue to develop this and it does get better now before we jump out of here Let me show you let me close this so they can actually get better or bigger Let me show you what the settings look like. So this is the settings panel now There aren't that much settings, but it does have a couple ones. So obviously if you want to change the font There's a whole section here for changing the font very standard And I'm glad that it's here. You can also change the window transparency and the width it does the width part doesn't really Work all that well in a tiny window manager. I could make this floating So the if you have it floating it looks like this and then the width variable would actually work Instead of just being you know a window and if you were on a tiling window manager You could make a rule so that this is always floating if you want but the coolest one here is that It will allow you to see the history. So if you view the history It will show you everything that has been said with time stamps in this window here So it will go all the way back to wherever we You know started at the beginning all the way back now It's obviously not perfect because it gets all the errors as it says It's just putting all of the stuff that's in the history right there in the history file I just coughed and it did not pick up the coughs. It didn't just say cough cough That would have been hilarious But anyways the history part is what's cool So if you wanted to use this like say during class like say you're in university or high school or something like that And you're allowed to have your your linux phone there or your linux laptop You could have this running and it would take somewhat imperfect notes for you But it would also put them in this transcript with timestamps so you could simultaneously record the audio and the text of the Professor and then look back at the timestamps and kind of align them So you'd have a closed caption of the Lecture as it was going on with timestamps. That is freaking cool Now it does allow you to tweak the speed and performance of the stuff So if you need to Make it run a little bit better on older hardware You can do that and it does allow filtering and it actually turns the filtering on by default So if I wanted to say, you know a swear word of some kind So shit it does something like that now if I turn off the filtered profanity and then say It'll actually say it so damn it It does a pretty good job with swear words. Now. I'm probably going to get demonetized. So thank you for that Anyways, and what's cool about this is you can be in the settings turn this back on and then say shit again And it does it real time. It's Really really cool. I'm so impressed by this application And I can't get over the fact that it's just so useful for so many people if you have hearing problems or some kind of disability where you have Problems like that. This could be useful if you're a student or if you need to take notes of any kind like you're You're in business of some kind and you're in a meeting and you want to have a transcript of the meeting This could be very useful. Again. I wish it did better with Grammar and stuff like that if it did grammar This should be just I mean it would take my first impressions of this as being really freaking cool to the whole Level to a whole nother level You don't really Realize how often you misspeak when you see it come back at you in text Period um Really want that grammar. I mean seriously also capitalize eyes, man Eye the letter eye litter letter. Okay. Yeah, see that's what I'm talking about If you're watching this as you speak It can it can get your head just a little bit that is not I don't think if you're using this to transcribe like a live screen or something like that You'd see the mistakes as much as I am because I know what I just said And I know that what it's printing isn't actually what I just said in some cases, right? So yeah, that is live captions. I'll leave a link to this in the video description It is I mean seriously one of the coolest apps that I've seen on linux in a while now Like I said several times listed throughout this video It's not perfect and you've seen that you know, it makes mistakes. It's not going to be perfect, but It's 90 to 95 of the way there and it does a just a fantastic job of just keeping up, right It's so good. So if you need captions or something like that, you know For whatever reason or you're looking to transcribe notes or a lecture or whatever give live captions a try I don't think you'll be sorry that you did so that's it for this video If you have thoughts on live captions or any other Software like this you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on math to downer odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube You guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channels will not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you very very very very very very good more I don't know why I get stuck on the word very I get I always want to say very very much Then I just go very very very very very very it's it's done. I can't help it It's gonna be it's gonna be it's gonna be a thing. Anyways, thanks for your support Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time nailed The word everybody again, that's two videos Anyways, thanks for watching. I'll see you next time