Calls, videos, podcasts and lectures, transcribed as they play and drawn in an overlay that stays above every window. Translated live if you want it. Nothing leaves the Mac.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
Switch apps and the captions stay: the overlay is above every window, and lets clicks through.
Click a window to bring it forward. Hold ⇧ and drag the captions to move them, as you would in the app.
Point at the captions and they dissolve under you. Hold ⌥ to stack the last few back up. Both work here exactly as they do in the app.
Captions any app your Mac can play
Use cases
In a meeting, second language or not, one missed word costs you the next three. Subtitles captions whatever your Mac is playing, in the app it is playing in, so you keep up without asking anyone to repeat themselves. Whether you are deaf or hard of hearing, hearing but not following, listening in a second language, or just working somewhere loud, three situations come up again and again.
01
Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, a Slack huddle, a Discord call, a call in a browser tab: all of it is just audio coming out of an app, so all of it gets captioned. No bot joins, nobody is told, nothing shows in the participant list. Reading a word you only half-heard is faster than asking for it again, and it doesn't interrupt anyone.
02
Switch to your notes, your editor or a browser. The overlay stays above every window and lets clicks through, so the conversation carries on without you watching it. A notepad like Granola writes the meeting up afterwards; this is the half that has to happen while it is still going on.
03
A video with no captions, or with automatic ones that are worse than none. A podcast in a language you're still learning. A recorded or a streaming lecture, an interview, a film with quiet dialogue. Anything that plays is captioned as it plays, in its own language or translated into yours.
Privacy
The reason you can point this at a work call is that it is not a service. There is no server, no account and no transcript, so there is nothing to send and nobody else in the loop. The long version is written down. The source is published, so none of it has to be taken on trust.
Features
Live audio can't be paused, can't be re-run, and shouldn't have to leave your machine. Everything here follows from that.
It runs locally and offline: no accounts, no telemetry, no network call carrying anything of yours. Audio goes from the tap straight into the recogniser and is discarded. The only things ever downloaded are the model, once, and an update when you choose one.
Roughly 0.15 real-time factor: six seconds of speech transcribed per second of compute. The same model on the CPU measured about 100× too slow to keep up with a live stream.
It listens to everything your Mac plays by default, so there is nothing to set before it works. Narrow it to a single app from the menu bar when two things are talking at once, and it captures that app plus every helper process it spawns, which is what makes browsers and Electron apps work, where audio never comes from the main process.
A voice detector runs ahead of the recogniser so backing tracks never reach it. Without it, music fills the model's context and the first words after it are lost.
Optionally start a fresh subtitle when someone else starts talking, the same way a pause does. Off by default: it runs a second model alongside the first.
The default model detects the language itself. English gets seven dedicated checkpoints on top, trading latency against accuracy from 160 ms upward.
Move the pointer near the box and it fades away underneath it, so the sentence you are reading never covers the sentence you are writing. How much of it goes and how wide the hole reaches are both yours to set. Hold ⇧ to keep it solid.
The box pages like broadcast subtitles: it fills, clears and starts again, so a line you glanced away from is gone. Hold ⌥ and the finished boxes stack back up above the live one, every one of them since the last pause in the talk, scrollable for the older ones and searchable with ⌥F. Let go and they are gone again. Nothing is written anywhere.
⌘, from the menu opens settings: how many lines a box fills before it clears, how solid it is, how far the pointer reveal reaches, how far back ⌥ goes. Every slider applies to the overlay as you drag it, so you set these by watching them rather than by picking a number.
How it works
A realtime audio thread that only ever copies, a portable core that never transcribes, and a model running where it belongs.
48 kHz stereo, a callback every 10.7 ms. The realtime thread copies into a lock-free ring buffer and does nothing else.
Down to 16 kHz mono on a worker thread, silence skipped, with about a second replayed ahead of speech so no word starts cold.
A streaming model, not a 30-second-window one: the difference between captions that track the audio and captions that arrive seconds late.
Three-line pages that clear and restart the way broadcast subtitles do, fading four seconds after the last new text rather than after the audio stops.
Everything from the ring buffer to the model boundary is portable Rust that deliberately doesn't transcribe: it hands out frames. The tap and the overlay are the only Mac-specific parts.
Compare
macOS has captions built in, free, on every Apple silicon Mac, under System Settings, Accessibility, Live Captions. If that covers what you need, use it. These are the places it stopped covering mine, and there is a row-by-row comparison if you want the long version.
| Feature | Subtitles | Apple Live Captions |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | Sixteen, detected automatically, translated live between any pair | Not available in every language or region |
| The overlay | Click-through, fades under the pointer, stays above every window | A window you move and resize |
| What it listens to | Everything the Mac plays, or one app of your choosing | Everything the Mac plays |
| Music | Skipped by a voice detector, so a backing track never becomes lyrics | Captioned |
| Speaker changes | Optional new box per speaker | No equivalent |
| The model | Seven English checkpoints trading latency against accuracy, plus the multilingual one | One, fixed |
| Price | Free for 7 days, then $9 once, every update included | Free, built in |
What people say
So smooth, very useful during meetings on different apps (slack, zoom, google), so well integrated on the screen, doesn't block interacting with the other windows, love it!
Almost no setup, no tweaking around: you install it and it just works. Simple, useful and really effective.
Very handy! I love how it can be connected to any audio source on my laptop, which helps not only for meetings and videocalls, but also for all those streaming services that do not support subtitles, like news websites or even some YouTube videos. The model supports many languages, so it's also useful if you're learning a foreign language and need subtitles to help you understand what's being said.
I work at an American company and my meetings are in English, which is not my first language and not most of my colleagues’ either. I would be halfway through something else when the part that mattered was said, and it would be gone: a word I did not catch, an accent I was not used to, two people talking over each other. Asking for it again costs everyone thirty seconds and interrupts whoever was speaking.
So the captions had to stay readable while I was doing something else. That is why they are an overlay above every window rather than a panel inside one app, why they take no clicks, and why they fade under the pointer instead of needing to be moved. Everything else on this page came after that.
Mathieu Jouhet, who makes it.
Pricing
Try it free for 7 days first, with no card and no account. Then $9, once: no minutes to buy, no seats, no renewal, every future update included, for less than one month of any transcription subscription.
Subtitles for Mac
$9 one-time
One-time $9 · macOS 14.2 or later · Apple silicon
About 633 MB downloaded on first launch.
FAQ
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
Free for 7 days, no card, then $9 once, every future update included ·
macOS 14.2 or later · Apple silicon
Unlimited live captions, for as long as you own the Mac. No minutes to
buy, no account, no subscription. Read the setup guide.
