Windows 11 beta adds live captions in European Portuguese, Korean, and more

Windows Insiders enrolled in the Beta channel are getting a new update for Windows 11 today, bringing the build number up to 22624.1616 and 22621.1616, depending on whether you've opted to receive the latest updates or not. This time around, the list of changes is very minor, and this build is mostly focused on fixing issues throughout Windows 11. However, for users on build 22624.1616, it's worth noting that Windows 11 is expanding support for live captions for even more languages and dialects.

Indeed, Microsoft has been adding support for more languages since live captions were introduced with Windows 11 version 22H2, and with today's update, Danish and Korean are supported. Additionally, new dialects for previously-supported languages are also being added. You can now use live captions in French (Canada), English (Ireland), and Portuguese (Portugal).

Aside from that, it's mostly about fixes, including one for a change that Microsoft recently made to Windows Update. If you're on build 22624.1616, there's a toggle that allows you to choose whether to receive the latest features as soon as they're available, and if you enable it, you'll receive a small configuration update that's just meant to ensure everything is working on Microsoft's end. For users on build 22621, this toggle is what allows you to switch to build 22624 going forward, but that was already implemented in a previous build. The remaining fixes are as follows:

[General]

Fixed an underlying issue which was causing a noticeable increase in explorer.exe crashes in the last flight for some Insiders.

[Input]

Fixed an issue where the touch keyboard didn’t correctly recognize a hardware keyboard was available in some cases.
Updated the TextInput/EnableTouchKeyboardAutoInvokeInDesktopMode MDM policy to allow “2” as a valid value to enforce showing the touch keyboard on tapping an edit control even when the hardware keyboard is attached.

[Live captions]

Fixed an issue that was causing live captions to crash on first launch due to an issue impacting registry data retrieval.
Fixed an issue causing live captions’ Add a language menu icon and label to overlap.
Features have been added to the enhanced speech recognition language files to improve performance and provide out-of-language filtering meant to limit the incorrect captions for speech not in the caption language.

[Accessibility]

Fixed an issue that was leaving voice access’s window empty after opening.
Fixed an issue where voice access was crashing when using the command to go to the start of a document.
Fixed an issue where if you turn off the profanity filter in voice access, it wouldn’t work.
Fixed an issue where Narrator’s CTRL + Narrator + Home and Ctrl + Narrator + End commands to move to the beginning and end of text weren’t working correctly in Edge.

Despite the focus on fixes, there are still some known issues in this release, which you can see below:

[Search on the Taskbar]

If you have the Bing button in the search box on the taskbar and you restart your computer, you may see the daily rotating search highlight for some time before getting the Bing button back.

[File Explorer]

Insiders who have access keys in File Explorer:

Shift + Right click on a file or folder is not opening “Show more options”.

[Live captions]

On ARM64 devices, enhanced speech recognition support installed through the Language & Region settings page will require restarting live captions if you switch languages in the live captions Caption language menu.
When adding a language through the Language & Region settings page, language feature installation progress may become hidden, and you may not see install completion of “Enhanced speech recognition” (required by Live Captions). (You can use the language’s “Language options” to monitor progress.) If this happens, there may be an unexpected delay before the live caption setup experience detects this and lets you continue.

As per usual, if you're already on the Beta channel, you'll receive these updates automatically sooner rather than later. Otherwise, if you haven't joined yet, you can do it through the Settings app on your PC, but keep in mind you'll be sacrificing stability.