Live Captions is an application that provides realtime automatic subtitles for the Linux desktop.

Only the English language is supported currently. Other languages may produce gibberish or a bad phonetic translation.

Features:

• Simple interface
• Caption desktop/mic audio locally, powered by deep learning
• No API keys, no proprietary services/libraries, no telemetry, no spying, no data collection, does not use network permission
• Adjust font, font size, and toggle uppercase/lowercase
• Less confident text is faded (darkened), this feature can be disabled

Running this requires a somewhat-decent CPU that can perform realtime captioning, especially if you want to be doing other tasks (such as video decode) while running Live Captions. It has been tested working on:

• Intel i7-2670QM (2011)
• Intel i5-8265U (2018)
• AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (2017)
• Steam Deck

GPU is not required or used.

The live captions may not be accurate. It may make mistakes, including when it comes to numbers. Please do not rely on the results for anything critical or important.

More models may be trained and released in the future with better and more robust accuracy.