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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.
Live Transcript isn’t out yet: the download button on the home page starts working on release day.
Setting it up
In Settings › Language, choose One language or Auto-detect. With one language, pick a Translate to language and every line is translated into it. With Auto-detect, list the languages: lines in the first are translated into the second, and lines in any other language into the first.
macOS may download language files the first time you use a language pair.
Choosing an engine for mixed languages
With a Whisper engine, Auto-detect works out the language of each phrase on its own, so captions can follow a speaker who switches mid-conversation; Whisper High is designed to handle accents and mixed languages best. Apple Speech starts with the first language you list and switches when speech stops making sense in it. An engine set to a single language hears everything as that language.
Later, in History
When translation was on, translated lines can show under each line in History, and a search in either language finds them.
Read more
- Live translation
- More than one language in the same conversation
- Docs: AI summaries, questions and translation
Other questions
- How do I get live captions for any audio on a Mac?
- How do I transcribe my Mac’s system audio without BlackHole or a virtual audio device?
- How do I caption a video call or a video in my browser on a Mac?
- How do I find what was said in something I listened to last week?
- Does live transcription on a Mac work offline, and is it private?