Subtitles · Guides · Live Captions language support
Apple ships Live Captions with macOS and, in its own documentation, says the feature is not available in every language, country or region. That one sentence is why the panel is missing on a perfectly good Mac. Here is what decides it, how to check in half a minute, and what the honest options are when the answer is no. Which macOS you are on matters more than it used to: on Sonoma and Sequoia the list is English (U.S.) and English (Canada), and Tahoe is where it grew to eight languages.
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Live Captions is not a single switch that is either on or off. It is gated three separate ways, and only one of them is about the language you want captions in. This is why two people on the same macOS version, with the same Mac, get different answers.
There is no page anywhere that turns those three into a yes or a no for your particular Mac. The only reliable test is to look, which takes about thirty seconds.
From the Apple menu in the top left corner. On macOS 12 and earlier this is System Preferences instead, which is already an answer: Live Captions is not there.
It sits in the Hearing group, below Audio and Captions. Searching the settings window for live captions gets you there faster and, more usefully, finds nothing at all when the feature is not available to you.
No row at all means the Mac, the macOS version, or your language and region. A row you can switch on means you have it. A row that switches on and then downloads means it is working and you are waiting.
If the row is there but the language you need is not in its menu, that is the clearest answer of the three, and the one nothing on your end can change. Changing the Mac's own language does not add a caption language; they are separate lists.
Three options, and the first two cost nothing. Work down the list rather than to the bottom of it.
Apple adds languages and regions between releases, and does it quietly: Tahoe took the list from two English variants to eight languages in one release. It costs thirty seconds and it is free, so it is worth doing before anything else on this page.
Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and YouTube all caption in more languages than Apple does, free, inside their own window. If everything you need captioned happens in one of those, you are done.
Worth paying for only when the answer above is no: the calls are on an app with nothing built in, or half of it is video and podcasts, or the language is missing everywhere you look.
English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Ukrainian and Mandarin. Not a region among them: a language is either in or out, and where you happen to be makes no difference to it.
| Pack | Size | Languages |
|---|---|---|
| Latin script | 583 MB | English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German |
| Full vocabulary | 633 MB | Dutch, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Mandarin |
One of the two downloads on first run and is then kept. Moving between languages inside a pack is instant; crossing between packs fetches the other one and keeps what you already have, so it happens once. Leave the menu on Multilingual and it works out which language it is hearing, or name the language and it stops guessing, which is the better setting when you already know.
Sixteen languages is not most languages. Polish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Hungarian, Bengali, Tamil and Cantonese are all absent, along with a great many others, and no setting here will add them.
This is not a page trying to talk you into a purchase that will not help. If your language is not one of the sixteen, this app is the wrong answer and you should stop reading here. What tends to work instead: whatever captioning the meeting app itself offers, since Zoom, Teams and Meet each cover languages this does not, and a cloud transcription service for recordings, which is the one category that reaches the long tail of languages, at the cost of sending the audio somewhere.
Understanding speech in a language you do not speak is not the same problem as reading captions in one you do. Both are here, and they are two separate steps rather than one setting.
Transcription puts words on screen in whatever is being spoken. Translation then turns those words into a language you choose, on the Mac, through Apple's own translator. Any of the sixteen into any other, which is 240 orderings rather than the to-English and from-English pairs a speech model gives you. It needs macOS 15; captioning runs on 14.2, where those rows are simply not in the menu.
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A language on the list means the model was trained for it, not that every sentence in it comes out right. Accuracy is best on clear speech and drops on heavy dialect, on two people talking at once, and on fast colloquial delivery down a bad connection. Names, jargon and acronyms are where any recognizer slips, in any language, and no setting fixes those.
Switching between languages mid-sentence is the other honest limit. The detector settles on one language and stays there, so a meeting that keeps crossing between two of them is the case where naming the language by hand beats leaving it on Multilingual.
macOS has this built in and free. Where it stops being enough.
Missing, grayed out, or on with nothing appearing. One cause per symptom.
Any of the sixteen into any other, on the Mac, while it is being said.
Subtitles in the language being spoken, and translation when you want it.
Captions on every app, without asking anyone to switch them on.
Installing, the permission that fails silently, and every setting worth knowing.
Until 31 October: $9 instead of $19 · 14-day refund
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