To get live captions on a Mac for whatever is playing — a video call, a livestream, a lecture replay, a video in any app — turn on TranscribeAnything's Live captions from the menu bar. It listens to your Mac's system audio, shows subtitles on screen in real time, works identically in every app because it captions the audio itself rather than integrating with each service, and saves the full timestamped transcript when you turn it off. Everything runs on-device.
Some apps caption themselves — some don't, and each one behaves differently. Captioning at the system-audio level means one switch covers everything your Mac can play: browser video, desktop apps, calls, local files, livestreams with no caption track at all. There's nothing to enable per-site and nothing that breaks when a service changes its player.
And unlike accessibility captions that vanish when the moment passes, the session becomes a transcript you can search or export afterward. TranscribeAnything runs Apple's on-device speech engine at up to 80× realtime, supports 10 languages, and costs $19.99/year for unlimited transcription — the first 5 transcriptions (up to 30 minutes each) are free.
Deaf and hard-of-hearing users captioning services that never added captions. Non-native speakers following a fast talker in a second language. Anyone watching in a noisy café or a silent office. And note-takers who want a running text record of a webinar without recording video. Because it's on-device, it also works on content you couldn't send to a cloud captioner — an internal all-hands, an embargoed briefing, a client call.