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.

  • Free for 7 days, no card, no account
  • $9 once, every update included
  • 14-day refund, no questions asked
  • Download for macOS 14.2 or later, Apple silicon
  • Rated 5.0 on Gumroad

The slide is shared, the presenter keeps talking, and you write your questions in front of it all. Nothing in the roster, nothing for the tenant to approve.

What it captions on a Teams call

The other people

It taps what your Mac plays, so you read everyone else on the call. A customer call, a standup, an all-hands you are only listening to: the other side is what gets captioned. Your microphone is never opened, which means presenting is uncaptioned by definition: you read the questions coming back, not your own answer.

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.

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 translates on every plan there is, because there is no plan: any of its sixteen languages into any of the other fifteen, on your own Mac, for $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 the only requests left are a daily check for a newer version, which you can decline, and a monthly check of your licence key once you have one.
  • You are not looking at Teams. The call is in one window and the work is in another: the document being edited, the board, the ticket somebody just mentioned. Teams keeps its captions inside Teams, so they go behind all of that the moment you switch. This overlay is above every window and takes no clicks, so moving between apps costs you nothing.

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.

Read the call, whatever the tenant says.

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.

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. After the one-time model download the only requests left are a daily check for a newer version, which you can decline, and a monthly check of your licence key once you have one. 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.