Subtitles · Live captions for podcasts
A podcast is the thing you listen to while doing something else, which is exactly when a sentence gets away from you. Subtitles captions whatever your Mac is playing, in any player, on an overlay that sits above the window you are actually working in.
Until 31 October: $9 instead of $19 · 14-day refund
You are never looking at the player. The captions come to whatever you are working in, including the shows that have no transcript.
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.
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, a browser tab. It captures the audio an app produces, and for browsers and Electron apps the helper processes that go with it, so the choice of player is not a compatibility question.
Two people in a room with one microphone between them, a back catalog from 2014, a feed with eleven listeners. These are the episodes that have nothing, and they are usually the ones where the audio is hardest.
The default model works out what it is hearing rather than asking you to declare it, which matters on a show that switches language for a guest and switches back.
Nobody sits and watches a podcast. It plays while you are writing code, going through email, moving tickets around, doing the work that does not need all of your head. That is the whole appeal of the format, and it is also why a word goes past you every few minutes: not because you cannot hear it, but because your attention was on the other window when it arrived.
A transcript in the podcast app does not help with that, because the podcast app is not the window you are in. This overlay is above every window and lets clicks through, so the last thing said is on screen wherever you happen to be working, and you never touch it.
14-day refund, no questions asked.
Apple Podcasts generates transcripts automatically, in twelve languages, and they are good. Spotify has them for some shows. If that covers what you listen to, in the app you listen in, it is free and you should use it. Here is where it runs out.
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.
On-device captions, whatever Workspace tier you are on.
Captions with no workspace app to get approved.
macOS has this built in and free. Where it stops being enough.
Captions live, rather than once the recording is processed.
Complementary, not alternatives. Notes after, captions during.
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.
