Block Live Captions in Google Meet

This article is written for G Suite for Education Administrators.

Google rolled out Live captions in Google Meet in Apr 2019 to make meetings more accessible for participants with different hearing abilities.

For k-12 schools, new features may not be always beneficial despite of productivity gain. This live caption feature could distract students from studying remotely.

This article explains how Safe Doc, a chrome extension, blocks live captions in Google Meet. If you have yet to install Safe Doc, apply a 30 days trial.

What's changing

Without Safe Doc, in Google Meet interface, there are a Turn on captions button at the bottom bar and a Turn on captions menu item in the popped menu.

Safe Doc removes those entries in Meet.

Who's impacted

Students who uses Chromebooks on which Safe Doc is installed and activated.

How to get started

If you have deployed Safe Doc and read Safe Doc Configuration, blocking live captions can be done by adding this policy.

{
  "BlockMeetCaptions": {
    "Value": true
  }
}

On/off by default?

This blocking feature is OFF by default.