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Live Captions is not working on your Mac

Six symptoms, one cause each. Start with the one that matches what you are actually seeing, because the fix for a missing row and the fix for an empty caption window have nothing to do with each other. Two of the six have no fix at all, and this page says so rather than sending you round the settings twice.

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Which symptom is yours?

Live Captions lives in System Settings under Accessibility, in the Hearing group. Everything below assumes you have looked there first, because where it fails tells you what is wrong.

There is no Live Captions row

Nothing under Accessibility, and searching the settings window finds nothing either.

The switch will not stay on

It is there, you turn it on, and it turns itself back off or sits at a percentage.

It is on and nothing appears

The window is there, the audio is playing, and the captions stay empty.

It works, then stops

Fine for a while, then the text freezes and never picks the audio back up.

The window is in the way

It covers what you are trying to read, or it vanishes behind the app you switch to.

The words are the wrong language

Captions arrive, in English, for audio that is not in English.

There is no Live Captions row

Nothing is broken. The row is absent rather than greyed out whenever the Mac is not eligible, and there are three ways to be ineligible.

  • An Intel Mac. Live Captions is Apple silicon only. Check the Apple menu, About This Mac: a Chip line means Apple silicon, a Processor line means Intel. No macOS update will add the feature to an Intel Mac, and nothing else on this page will help you either.
  • An older macOS. If you have System Preferences rather than System Settings, the feature is newer than the macOS you are running. Software Update is the whole fix.
  • Your language or region. Apple's documentation says the feature is not available in every language, country or region, and that is exactly what an absent row looks like. What decides it, and what to do is its own page, because it is the most common cause and the least obvious one.

The switch will not stay on

Turning Live Captions on the first time fetches what it needs to run on-device, and it will tell you it is doing that. A percentage that is not moving is a network problem rather than a captions problem: a captive portal, a VPN, or a corporate network that blocks the fetch. Take the Mac onto a plain connection for the length of the download and it usually goes straight through.

A switch that flicks back off immediately is worth one restart before anything more drastic. If it survives a restart and still refuses, the remaining likely cause is disk space: the download is not small, and a nearly full startup disk fails it quietly.

It is on and nothing appears

The caption window exists and stays empty. Four checks, in the order that finds it fastest.

  1. 1

    Is the sound reaching the Mac's own output?

    Audio going out over a Bluetooth headset in call mode, an external interface or a second display is the single most common reason for captions that never arrive. Play something through the Mac's own speakers and see whether the captions wake up.

  2. 2

    Is it listening to the microphone instead?

    If the caption window has a microphone control, check which way it is set. Pointed at the room, it will not caption a call; pointed at the Mac, it will not caption the person across the table. Silence looks the same either way.

  3. 3

    Has the download actually finished?

    A caption window can appear before the thing that fills it has arrived. Go back to the Live Captions pane and check there is no progress left running.

  4. 4

    Is anything being said?

    Music, applause, hold tone and background noise are not speech, and captions that stay blank through them are behaving correctly. Test on something with a person talking in it before concluding anything.

It works, then stops

Captions that run and then freeze have almost always lost the audio rather than the words. Sleeping the Mac, switching output device, unplugging headphones or a call moving from one app to another all break the connection between what is playing and what is being read.

Switching Live Captions off and on again re-establishes it, which is faster than a restart and works nearly every time. If it happens on every wake from sleep, that is worth knowing rather than fixing: it is the normal behaviour of captions attached to an audio route that no longer exists.

The window is in the way

This one is not a fault, it is the design. Apple's captions arrive in a window, and a window does what windows do: it sits in the stack, it can end up behind the thing you switch to, and where you put it is a compromise between reading the captions and seeing what is underneath them. Moving it is the only lever you have.

Which matters most when you are doing something else at the same time, and you usually are: taking notes, reading the document under discussion, looking up the thing that was just mentioned. A window full of captions is behind all of that the second you switch. That is the reason this app renders them as an overlay instead: above every window, click-through, so it never takes focus and never needs moving out of the way. Point at it and it dissolves so you can read what is beneath it, and it comes back when you look away.

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The words are the wrong language

Captions set to one language and fed another does not fail, it guesses, and the result reads like nonsense with the right rhythm. Check the language in the Live Captions pane rather than the language of the Mac: the two are separate settings and only the first one matters here.

If the language you need is not in that menu, no amount of setting it will help, and that is the language support problem rather than this one.

When none of this is the problem

Two of the six have no fix. An Intel Mac cannot run Live Captions, and a language or region Apple has not enabled cannot be talked into existing. Nothing in System Settings changes either one.

On an Intel Mac, this app is not the answer either. It is built on Core Audio process taps, an API that arrived in macOS 14.2 and only on Apple silicon, so the honest advice there is to use whatever captioning the meeting app itself provides. On an Apple silicon Mac whose language Apple does not cover, it is a different story: sixteen languages, no region condition, and it never asks macOS whether you are allowed.

It captions apps, not the system

All system audio by default, or one app if you would rather. Either way it taps what is playing rather than asking the app to cooperate, so a browser tab captions the same way a native app does.

When it fails, it says so, in one place

There is exactly one silent failure and the menu names it: without the audio recording permission, macOS hands over buffers of pure silence and reports success. Check Audio Permission in the menu opens the pane that fixes it.

It runs on the Mac

On the Neural Engine, offline, with nothing written to disk. One download on first run and then no network call left to make, which is also why nothing here can break because a server did.

Questions people ask next

Where is Live Captions in System Settings?
Accessibility, in the Hearing group, below Audio and Captions. Typing "live captions" into the search field at the top of the settings window is quicker, and finding nothing is itself the answer: the feature is not available on that Mac.
Why is Live Captions greyed out?
Usually because it is still fetching what it needs to run on-device, and occasionally because the startup disk is too full to finish. If the row is absent rather than greyed out, that is a different problem: the Mac is Intel, the macOS is older than the feature, or your language and region are not covered.
Does Live Captions work on an Intel Mac?
No, and no update will change that. Check the Apple menu, About This Mac: a Chip line means Apple silicon, a Processor line means Intel. On Intel your options are the captions built into Zoom, Teams, Meet or YouTube, since this app needs Apple silicon too.
Live Captions is on but the window stays empty. Why?
Nearly always the audio is not going where the captions are listening: an output device other than the Mac, a Bluetooth headset in call mode, or a microphone setting pointed the wrong way. Play something through the Mac's own speakers to rule that out before changing anything else.
Why do captions stop after the Mac sleeps?
Because the audio route the captions attached to no longer exists when the Mac wakes. Switching captions off and on again rebuilds it, which is faster than restarting. This app behaves the same way and for the same reason, and the fix there is the same two clicks.
Can I run both at once?
Yes. They are unrelated pieces of software and neither knows about the other, though two sets of captions on one screen is mostly a way to compare them rather than a way to read anything.
Is there a Live Captions equivalent that works in more languages?
This app covers sixteen with no country or region condition, and can translate between any two of them on macOS 15. It still needs Apple silicon and macOS 14.2, so it widens the language answer and not the hardware one.

The same overlay, elsewhere

vs Apple Live Captions

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

Live Captions and your language

Why the row is missing, and what sixteen languages with no region covers.

Real-time subtitles on a Mac

Every route to captioning system audio, free ones first.

Set-up guide

Installing, the permission that fails silently, and every setting worth knowing.

Deaf and hard of hearing

Captions on every app, without asking anyone to switch them on.

Every alternative, compared

Six ways to get captions on a Mac, and which one fits you.

Captions that do not depend on being in the right country.

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