Google Meet live captions and saved transcripts solve different problems. Captions help you follow speech during the call. Transcription creates a shared meeting artifact when an eligible person starts it. Turning on captions for yourself does not establish that a transcript document will exist afterward.
Use captions for your own reading view
On a computer, join the meeting and use Captions and translation to turn captions on. Google’s live-caption settings apply only to you. You can review earlier captions within the available caption view, but only for portions when you were in the meeting with captions enabled. This is not a substitute for a saved transcript of the whole session.
Use Transcribe for a saved spoken record
For an eligible meeting, an authorized person selects Meeting tools, Transcribe, and Start transcription, then confirms Start. The transcript indicator is visible to participants. Host Management affects who can operate it, and the feature needs sufficient host and organizational Drive storage. Saved transcripts support a specified set of languages, so the presence of a language in live captions does not prove transcript support.
Check the artifact you actually need
The transcript is stored in the organizer’s Drive and contains spoken words rather than chat messages. Saved captions embedded with a recording are another option and require the recording’s caption setting; they are not the same document. AI meeting notes are a generated summary with separate controls and sharing settings. Before the meeting ends, confirm which of these features was active and who will receive its result. If only personal captions were enabled, tell people honestly that this did not create a saved transcript. Do not promise that captions can later reconstruct the parts you missed.
References
Reviewed against the linked official product guidance on November 4, 2026. Features, limits, screen labels, and access can vary by account, platform, region, and organization policy.