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For the everyday stuffworking name

Caption Glass

A Windows app. The caption bar below is the real thing, running in a browser; the Windows app itself still needs a real PC to capture.

Live captions for everything a Windows PC plays, shown right on top of the game or call.

For games and calls where it's hard to make out what people say.

Caption Glass's caption bar over a dark night scene: a line reading "You: Hold on, I am nearly out of charges." in pale blue, and under it "PC audio: Then take the stairs, I will keep them looking the other way." in white, each on its own black band. Click to try it
Caption Glass's own caption bar, drawing a conversation somebody wrote by hand, with the styles and the number of lines you can change. It is not listening to anything and does no speech recognition: the words are written into the page.

The app itself runs on Windows and captions what your PC plays and what your own microphone hears, separately, with the speech model on your own machine. How accurate and how fast that is was measured separately.

Caption Glass captions voice chat, calls, games and video on Windows, using a speech model that runs on the PC itself. The captions sit in a bar that stays on top and lets clicks pass through to whatever is underneath. Your own mic gets its own label and color, so it's clear who said what.

Who it's for

Anyone who wants readable captions on a Windows PC for voice chat, calls, games and video: deaf and hard of hearing players, people in noisy rooms, and anyone whose teammates mumble.

What it does

  • Captions on top of whatever's running. Voice chat, calls, games and video, in a bar that stays on top and lets clicks through to whatever's underneath.
  • Tells your voice apart from everyone else's. The mic on this PC is labeled “You”, in its own color.
  • Big, readable styles. Large text and high contrast, and every built-in style is designed to meet WCAG AA contrast for both speakers.
  • No internet needed after setup. Once the speech model is downloaded, it runs entirely on the PC.
  • Pro can keep a history. It's off unless turned on. Search it, or export it as SRT, WebVTT or plain text.
  • Pro also does the streamer stuff. A clean captions-only source for OBS, a list of names and jargon to listen for, translation into English, and bigger speech models.
  • And dictation. Push to talk into any app, and it restores whatever was on the clipboard before.

What it doesn't do

  • No cloud speech service, no account and no telemetry.
  • Audio is never written to disk, not even temporarily.
  • It captions speech, and labels it by where it came from, not by who said it.
  • It runs on Windows 10 and 11 only.
  • No pop-ups or timers over the captions to sell Pro.

Questions

Does it send my audio anywhere?
No. Audio is held in memory just long enough to turn speech into text on your PC, then discarded. It is never written to disk.
Are accessibility features part of Pro?
No. Readable styles and every accessibility option are in the free version.

What it keeps, and where

Audio is processed in memory on the PC and never written to disk or sent anywhere. Captions are saved only if history is turned on, and only on that PC.

Goes online only for: Speech model download (only when you ask for it); Dictation cleanup (Pro) (off until you turn it on).

The full Caption Glass privacy section

Runs on, and what it'll cost

Runs on
Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit desktop app).
Cost
Live captions on a small speech model are free. The plan for Pro is one purchase that comes with a year of updates, and anything released in that year keeps working after. If money's tight, ask for a hardship code. Accessibility features are never behind the paywall.

Windows and OBS are trademarks of their respective owners. Caption Glass is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.