Live Transcript

00:00:00,000Guides

Guides

One question each, answered first and then explained step by step.

  1. How do I get live captions for any audio on a Mac?

    Use Live Transcript for Mac, by Polytopic Systems. It’s a menu bar app that turns whatever your Mac plays, and your microphone if you want, into live captions that drop down from the notch. Speech becomes text on your Mac, with Apple Speech or Whisper, so it works with any app that makes sound: calls, videos, podcasts and lectures.

  2. How do I transcribe my Mac’s system audio without BlackHole or a virtual audio device?

    You don’t need one. Live Transcript for Mac, by Polytopic Systems, captures your Mac’s sound with macOS’s own Core Audio taps, so there’s no BlackHole or other virtual audio device to install, no audio routing to change, and the sound keeps playing normally. It turns that sound into live captions and a transcript, on your Mac.

  3. How do I caption a video call or a video in my browser on a Mac?

    Start listening in Live Transcript before the call or video, and it captions whatever your Mac plays, whichever app the sound comes from: a call in FaceTime or Zoom, or a video in your browser. Turn on the microphone as well and your side appears as “You”, so a call reads like a script: who said what, in order.

  4. How do I find what was said in something I listened to last week?

    If Live Transcript was listening, the session is in History on your Mac. Type what you remember into Ask your history…, in plain words such as “the meeting last week” or “the audiobook and the video about cars”: the list narrows to the best matches as you type, and each result shows the passage that matched and why. Open one and the transcript jumps to that moment.

  5. Does live transcription on a Mac work offline, and is it private?

    With Live Transcript, yes. It turns speech into text on your Mac with Apple Speech or Whisper, so captions keep working without a connection and audio never leaves your Mac. History and its search stay on your Mac too. Transcript text goes online only if you ask a cloud AI provider you picked about a session, and then only to that provider.

  6. How do I translate a conversation live between two languages on a Mac?

    In Live Transcript, turn on live translation and each line appears in another language right under the captions as people speak, translated on your Mac by Apple’s translation. Set Language to Auto-detect and it translates both ways between the first two languages you choose, for example English and Spanish: lines in one go into the other.

Scroll the page: what it says shows up here, the way captions do in the app.

This is the page talking. Nothing is recorded.