Subtitles · Conversations in two languages
Choose the microphone in Listen To, pick your language in Translate To and turn on Show Both Languages, and every sentence lands in the box twice: your language on top, theirs under it, whichever of you is speaking. A visitor at your desk, a parent at a school meeting, a colleague over from the Lisbon office. You talk, they talk, and both of you read. Nothing leaves the Mac.
Until 31 October: $9 instead of $19 · 14-day refund
The app is listening to the room. The second line is Spanish, and if you do not speak Spanish it is no use to you. Then Translate To and Show Both Languages come on: English on top, Spanish under it, whoever is speaking, so you read yours and they read theirs.
Hold ⇧ and drag the captions to move them, as you would 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.
Since 1.8.0 the app can listen to the room as well as to the Mac, and the translation it already did for calls and videos works in both directions once it can hear both people. Nothing to set up beyond three rows in its menu, nothing to install for the other person, and nothing that leaves the machine.
Off until you choose it, and macOS asks for the microphone the first time you do, never at launch. It takes the place of what the Mac plays rather than mixing with it, so a conversation is only ever the conversation. The Mac's own microphone, or whichever input Sound settings has.
Pick the language to translate into. Whatever else is said arrives in it, and what is said in it goes back into the last other language heard. Any of the sixteen into any other, on the Mac, through Apple's own translator; a pair downloads once and works with Wi-Fi off after that.
The Translate To language on top as the caption, the other language under it in a smaller run. The same language is never shown twice, a page turns when either paragraph fills, and it is held long enough to read the slower of the two.
The recognizer tells which of the sixteen is being spoken, sentence by sentence, so nobody presses anything between turns. Translation works in turns too: a pause closes one and the next starts clean, rather than the whole conversation being retranslated every time someone finishes a sentence.
The box floats above everything on the screen. Hold ⇧ and drag it to the edge nearest the other person, take the size up in Text Size and Alignment, and hold ⌥ to bring back the last few sentences when somebody missed one.
Recognized on the Neural Engine, translated by Apple's framework on the machine, drawn and discarded. No account, no recording, no transcript unless you save one, and the orange microphone indicator in the menu bar the whole time it listens.
Or heard across it. Turn on Speak Translation and each translated sentence is read aloud once the room goes quiet, so the other person can listen rather than read. Whoever talks while it reads is still captioned, since the echo cancellation macOS uses for calls takes the translation's voice out of what the microphone hears. With headphones on, it reads straight away.
Two people, one Mac between them, and a language one of them does not have. The situations are ordinary; what was missing was a caption both of them could read.
It is a microphone, a speech recognizer and a translator, and each of the three has an edge. Knowing where they are is most of getting a good conversation out of it.
Translate To and Translation Timing, for a call or a video in another language.
Subtitles in the language you are learning, not the one you already know.
Every app captioned, and the room when you choose the microphone.
A normal hearing test, and speech that still falls apart in noise.
Captions for any Zoom call, without asking the host.
Captions in a Meet tab, whatever the account allows.
What Apple's built-in captions do, and where this goes further.
Everything that plays through macOS, and the honest exceptions.
Until 31 October: $9 instead of $19 · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
Free for 7 days, 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.
