Live translation for Google Meet Web
VoxTranslate for Chrome translates the audio of the Google Meet tab in your browser, giving you live subtitles over the call and an optional spoken translation. It works with the web client, not the desktop app, and nobody else in the meeting has to install or change anything.
How it works
You join the meeting at meet.google.com as usual, then press the VoxTranslate toolbar button on that tab. The click itself is what grants access, to that one tab and nothing else. VoxTranslate captures the tab's audio, transcribes and translates it, and draws subtitles in an overlay above the Meet interface — including in fullscreen. On tiers that produce audio you also hear a spoken translation, with the original Meet audio on its own volume control that ducks underneath while the translation speaks. Your microphone is never captured, so what you say goes into Meet exactly as it always did.
Why this comes up
Google Meet has its own speech translation, and where it fits it is good: voice-to-voice with the speaker’s voice preserved. But it covers five language pairs, all anchored to English, and it supports one pair per meeting — so a call with Italian, Spanish and German participants is not a plan upgrade away, it is impossible. It also needs Business or Enterprise with Gemini, which excludes most external guests.
Those limits are documented by Google and are the reason people go looking for something else. See live translation for Google Meet for what the native feature does and where it stops.
What changes with the extension
Nothing, for everyone else. That is the point.
You are not asking the organiser to move the meeting, add a bot, or grant a workspace integration. There is no participant list entry for VoxTranslate, because it is not in the meeting — it is in your browser, listening to your own tab.
That also sets the honest boundary: it solves your comprehension, not the room’s. If three people each need to be heard in their own language, that is a different problem and a VoxTranslate room is the tool for it.
When the native feature is enough
If your meetings are consistently English-to-one-other-language, everyone is on a Google Workspace plan with Gemini, and nobody external joins — use Meet’s own translation. It is included, it preserves the speaker’s voice, and adding a second tool for it would be worse, not better.
The extension earns its place when the pair is not English-anchored, when there are three languages in the room, when guests have no Workspace licence, or when you simply want to follow a call you were invited to and cannot change.
What it does not do
This works on the Meet web client only. The Google Meet desktop and mobile applications have no browser tab to listen to, so they are out of scope. Translation is one-directional and local to you: it translates what you hear, and the other participants get nothing back — for a call where everyone needs to be understood in their own language, a VoxTranslate room is the right tool instead. Chrome only. The spoken language is detected once when you press start, so a meeting that switches language halfway through needs the session restarted.