Subtitles · Live captions for Google Meet
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.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
Change tabs and the captions stay: they belong to the audio the tab plays, not to the tab. No extension, no bot, no Workspace tier.
It taps what your Mac plays, so you read everyone else on the call. A sales call, an interview, a webinar in a tab: whoever is speaking on the other end is what you read. Your microphone is never opened, so nothing you say, on the call or in the room around you, is transcribed anywhere at all.
It captions whatever your Mac plays, so a Meet tab is covered without configuring anything. Narrow it to the browser when you want only that, and it captures the helper processes the browser spawns, which is where tab audio actually lives, and why aiming at the main process alone would hear nothing.
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. Sixteen languages, detected for you, and a half-heard word readable rather than reconstructed.
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. If yours are missing, in the wrong language or greyed out, this guide takes each symptom in turn.
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.
14-day refund, no questions asked.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
Free for 7 days, 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.
Subtitles over a film, a stream or a tab that never had a track.
Subtitles in the language being spoken, and translation when you want it.
Captions on every app, without asking anyone to switch them on.
Captions that do not wait for the host to switch anything on.
Captions that do not depend on what your tenant’s admin allows.
macOS has this built in and free. Where it stops being enough.
Captions with no workspace app to get approved.
Captions for the shows that never had a transcript.
Captions live, rather than once the recording is processed.
Complementary, not alternatives. Notes after, captions during.