The other people
It taps what your Mac plays, so you read everyone else on the call. Your microphone is never opened, which means presenting is uncaptioned by definition: you read the questions coming back, not your own answer.
Subtitles · Live captions for Microsoft Teams
Live captions for Teams,
whatever your admin allows.
Subtitles captions the audio your Mac is playing, so a Teams call is just one more thing making sound. It asks Teams for nothing, which means no meeting policy, no tenant setting and no licence tier stands between you and reading what was just said.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
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 Teams' own captions?
Teams has live captions, they reach the free tier, and when they are available they work. Whether they are available is not, in most companies, your decision.
- Your admin owns the switch. Live captions are governed by meeting policy in the Teams admin center. Set to off, there is no toggle in your client to find, and nothing you can do about it from the inside of a call.
- Guest calls are someone else's policy. Join another company's meeting on their link and you inherit their tenant's rules, not yours. Subtitles does not care whose meeting it is; it is reading your speakers.
- They live inside the Teams window. Switch to your notes and the captions go behind it. This overlay is always on top and click-through, so you work in front of it rather than around it.
- Translated captions are a Premium add-on. Teams gates live translation behind Teams Premium. Subtitles does not translate either, but it captions nine languages, detects which one it is hearing, and costs $9 once.
- Where the audio is processed depends on your tenant. Microsoft detects the language on-device where it can and reaches for the cloud where it cannot. Here there is no cloud path to reach for, and nothing to configure your way out of: the model runs on the Neural Engine in your Mac, the call is never recorded, nothing is written to disk, and after the one-time model download there is no network call left to make.
Nothing in the roster, nothing in the tenant
The usual way to get text out of a meeting is a notetaker bot: it dials in, it appears in the participant list, and everyone can see the call is being captured. Most IT departments have an opinion about those, and in a regulated tenant the opinion is no.
Subtitles never authenticates to Microsoft, never asks for a Graph permission and never appears in the roster, because it does not know Teams exists. It reads the sound your Mac is already making.
14-day refund, no questions asked.
What it captions on a Teams call
The app or the browser
Guest links open in a browser tab as often as in the desktop app. Both work: it captures the helper processes an app spawns, which is where browser and Electron audio actually comes from.
Even when you can hear fine
One room microphone at the far end of a table, a colleague whose accent you are still tuning to, a name you would rather read than guess at. In a call with thirty people, asking for a repeat costs thirty people ten seconds, so mostly nobody asks.
Read the call, whatever the tenant says.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
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.
Teams questions
- Does it work if my admin has disabled captions in Teams?
- Yes. Meeting policy governs Teams' own captions, and Subtitles is not part of Teams: it captions the audio your Mac plays. There is no setting on the Microsoft side that can reach it.
- Does it work when I join another company's Teams meeting as a guest?
- Yes, and this is where it earns its place. On someone else's link you inherit their tenant's policy for captions; you do not inherit anything for this, because it never touches their meeting.
- Does it work with Teams in a browser?
- Yes. It captures an app and every helper process that app spawns, so the web client captions the same way the desktop app does.
- Does anything go to Microsoft?
- No. There is no network call at all after the one-time model download. The audio never leaves the machine, which is a different guarantee from a tenant setting you have to trust.
- Does it caption what I say?
- No. It only ever hears what your Mac plays, never your microphone, so you read the other people on the call and not yourself.
The same overlay, elsewhere
Zoom
Captions that do not wait for the host to switch anything on.
Google Meet
On-device captions, whatever Workspace tier you are on.
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.