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.
Until 31 October: $9 instead of $19 · 14-day refund
Hold ⇧ and drag the captions to move them, as you would in the app.
Point at the captions and they dissolve under you, as they do in the app.
Hold ⌥ to rewind, and the last few boxes stack back up.
Click in the menu bar: items marked Try all work in this demo.
Captions any app that plays sound on your Mac
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 real time, so you keep up without asking anyone to repeat themselves. Hold ⌥ to rewind and search through past captions. 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 the few words you half-heard is faster than asking for them again, and it doesn't interrupt anyone.
02
Switch to your notes, your code editor, AI agent, or a browser. The overlay stays above every window and lets clicks through, so the conversation carries on without you watching it, and you can keep working and interacting on what's behind. A notepad like Granola writes the meeting up afterwards, and its live transcript has to be hovered to show; this is the half that has to happen live, without you thinking or focusing on it.
03
A video with no captions. 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. Subtitles can also read the microphone if you ask it to, so you can hold conversations, in two languages, or in one.
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 unless you save one on your own Mac, so there is nothing to send and nobody else in the loop. The long version is there for you to read if you want to know more. 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 recognizer and is discarded. The only things ever downloaded are the models, 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 configure before it works. Narrow it to a single app from the menu bar when two things are talking at once. 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 recognizer, 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. It takes a second or two before a new speaker is recognized.
The default model detects the language itself. English gets seven dedicated options on top, so you can trade latency against accuracy from 160 ms upward.
Speak Translation reads each translated sentence aloud in the language's own voice, while the app it came from drops to a quarter of its volume. It turns itself on with VoiceOver, which can read the caption box too; VoiceOver's own speech is never captioned.
Move the pointer near the overlay, 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 choose in settings. Hold ⇧ to keep it solid and reposition.
The app pages like broadcast subtitles: it fills, clears and starts again, so a line you glanced away from is gone. Hold ⌥ to rewind: the previous captions stack back up above the live one, 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 the ⌥ rewind goes. Every slider applies to both the preview and the live overlay as you drag it, so you set these by watching them rather than by picking a number.
The eighteen languages the app captions, and translates between
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.
Two-line pages, configurable in settings, 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 live captions built in, free, under System Settings, Accessibility, Live Captions, on an Apple silicon Mac set to a language Apple has enabled: English alone on macOS 14 and 15, eight languages from 26. 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 | Eighteen, on every macOS from 14.2, automatically detected by the multilingual model, switched from the menu bar, translated live between almost any pair | English only on macOS 14 and 15; eight languages from 26, each tied to a country, one at a time, manually switched in System Settings, and no translation |
| The overlay | Click-through, fades under the pointer, stays above every window, never gets in the way of multitasking | A window that stays on top too, but takes the click and covers what is under it |
| What it listens to | Everything the Mac plays, the microphone if you ask, or one app of your choosing | Everything the Mac plays, or the microphone |
| Music | Skipped by a voice detector, so a backing track never becomes lyrics | Captioned |
| Speaker changes | Optional new box per speaker | No equivalent |
| Past captions | Every past caption, in a list that takes the available space, scrollable and searchable with ⌥F | Three lines that scroll, can't see more than three lines at once |
| The model | Seven English options trading latency against accuracy, plus the multilingual one. Multilingual can be pinned to a single language if needed | One, fixed, and you have to open System Settings and dig through a three-level deep setting to change the language. |
| Price | Free for 7 days, then $19 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.
Awesome app and the translation support makes it even better. Working with French colleagues has never been easier. Highly recommend!
Definitely a game changer for me! A must have for remote workers
Much better than macOS live captions. I love how fluid the UX is, the searchable history when pressing option and all the shortcuts are really well thought, you can feel the author really cares about nailing all the details for a useful live caption app. The gorgeous audio glow is chef's kiss
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, or something that was said a minute before. 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, why there is a searchable rewind stack, and why they fade under the pointer instead of needing to be moved. Everything else came from that.
Mathieu Jouhet, who makes it.
Pricing
Try it free for 7 days first, with no card and no account. Then $19, once: no minutes to buy, no seats, no renewal, every future update included, for about the price of one month of a transcription subscription.
Translation is in the price, not above it. The eighteen languages, the live translation between them, and the streaming model come with the one license; there is no second tier to unlock. All future updates included.
Subtitles for Mac
$19 one-time
One-time $19 · macOS 14.2 or later · Apple silicon
About 633 MB downloaded on first launch.
FAQ
Until 31 October: $9 instead of $19 · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
Free for 7 days, no card, then $19 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.
