Subtitles

Subtitles · Live captions for Google Meet

Live captions for Google Meet,
on your Mac rather than Google’s servers.

Subtitles captions the audio your Mac is playing, so a Meet call is just a browser tab making sound. No Workspace tier decides what you get, and the overlay stays on top when you leave the tab.

14-day refund, no questions asked

Buy for $9 See how it works

One-time $9, every future update included · macOS 14.2 or later · Apple Silicon
Unlimited captions, for as long as you like. No minutes to buy, no account, no subscription.

Why not Meet's own captions?

Meet's captions are free for everyone, which is more than most video platforms manage. Two things still get in the way, and one of them is the tab itself.

  • They are in the tab, and the tab is not always in front. Meet runs in a browser. Switch to your notes or another tab and its captions are not behind a window; they are not being drawn at all. This overlay is a separate always-on-top layer, and click-through, so it stays where you put it.
  • Google does the transcribing. Meet's captions are produced on Google's side. Subtitles runs the model on the Neural Engine in your Mac and opens no socket at all: the call is read, captioned and forgotten, with nothing recorded, nothing written to disk and nothing uploaded. That is a different kind of promise from a policy page, because there is no policy involved.
  • Translated captions are a paid Workspace tier. Live translation lands on Business Standard and above; free Google accounts and Workspace Individual do not have it. Subtitles does not translate either, but it captions nine languages, works out which one it is hearing, and does that on any account at all.
  • They stop when the call does. The same overlay carries on over the recording afterwards, the YouTube version, the podcast at lunch: anything your Mac plays, in or out of a meeting.

No bot on the invitation

The usual way to get text out of a meeting is a notetaker bot: it joins with a calendar invitation, it shows up in the participant list, and everyone can see the call is being captured.

Subtitles never signs in to Google, never asks for calendar access and never appears on anyone's screen but yours. It does not know Meet exists; it reads the sound your Mac is already making.

Buy for $9

14-day refund, no questions asked.

What it captions in a Meet tab

The other people

It taps what your Mac plays, so you read everyone else on the call. Your microphone is never opened, so nothing you say, on the call or in the room around you, is transcribed anywhere at all.

The tab, or all of Chrome

Point it at the browser and it captures the helper processes that browser spawns, which is where tab audio actually lives, and why aiming at the main process alone would hear nothing.

Even when you can hear fine

Meet calls are often the ones with people outside your company on them: unfamiliar accents, someone on a phone in a corridor, a second language on one side or the other. Nine languages, detected for you, and a half-heard word readable rather than reconstructed.

Read the call, whichever tab it is in.

14-day refund, no questions asked

Buy for $9

One-time $9, 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.

Google Meet questions

Do I need a Google Workspace plan?
No. Subtitles has nothing to do with your Google account: it captions the audio your Mac plays, on a free Gmail account or an Enterprise tenant alike.
Does it translate the call?
No, and neither do Meet's free captions. It captions what is said in the language it was said, across nine languages, and detects which one it is hearing. Meet's translated captions need Workspace Business Standard or above.
Do the captions stay visible when I switch tabs?
Yes. That is the main reason to use it over Meet's own: the overlay is a separate always-on-top layer, so leaving the Meet tab does not take the captions with it.
Does anything go to Google?
No. After the one-time model download there is no network call at all, and the audio never leaves your Mac.
Does it work with Meet in Safari, Chrome or Arc?
Any of them. It captures an app and every helper process it spawns, which is what all three are underneath.

The same overlay, elsewhere

Zoom

Captions that do not wait for the host to switch anything on.

Microsoft Teams

Captions that do not depend on what your tenant’s admin allows.

vs Apple Live Captions

macOS has this built in and free. Where it stops being enough.

Slack huddles

Captions with no workspace app to get approved.

Podcasts

Captions for the shows that never had a transcript.

Lectures

Captions live, rather than once the recording is processed.

vs Granola and notes apps

Complementary, not alternatives. Notes after, captions during.