How to get live captions for any app on Android

Plenty of what you watch and hear on your phone has no subtitles: short videos, livestreams, podcasts, voice messages, video calls. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing, in a noisy place, somewhere you can’t turn the sound up, or following a language you’re still learning, that gap matters.

Caption Flow fills it with Live Caption: it listens to the sound playing on your phone, or to the microphone, and writes it out in a caption box that floats over any app. Here’s how to set it up in a couple of minutes.

What you need

• An Android phone. To caption sound from other apps you need Android 10 or later; on older phones, Live Caption works through the microphone.
• Caption Flow from Google Play. Live Caption is included in the free plan.

Step 1: Choose where the sound comes from

Open Caption Flow and tap the Live Caption card on the home screen to see its options. Then decide what it should listen to:

• App audio. Turn on internal audio capture to caption whatever is playing on the phone: videos, podcasts, browser tabs, voice notes.
• Microphone. Leave it off to caption what the phone hears around it: a conversation, a lecture, a call on speaker, the TV across the room.

Step 2: Pick how it should listen

Under the audio language, you choose between offline and online captioning.

Offline runs on your phone. Download a speech model once, choosing fastest, balanced or higher accuracy, and captions work with no connection, with the audio never leaving the device. It’s the private, works-anywhere option.

Online is faster and more accurate. Google captioning covers more than 140 languages; you choose the one being spoken, and signing in gives you a free monthly allowance. AI captioning, part of Premium, detects the language for you, labels each speaker, and copes with people talking over each other.

Not sure which to pick? We compared them in Offline or online captions: which should you use?

Step 3: Start captioning

Tap Start. The first time, Caption Flow explains what it captures and Android asks for permission to record. Only audio is captured. Then switch to the app you want captioned and press play: words appear in the caption box as they’re spoken.

Drag the box anywhere on screen so it doesn’t cover what you’re watching. You can change the overlay and text colors in Settings.

Step 4: Start it from anywhere next time

Turn on the floating shortcut on the home screen. A small bubble then waits at the edge of your screen, so you can start Live Caption from inside any app with one tap, without switching back to Caption Flow.

When an app won’t give up its sound

Android lets apps opt out of having their audio captured by other apps, and a few streaming and calling apps do. If the caption box stays empty while sound is clearly playing, that’s usually why. Switch the audio source to the microphone and turn the volume up a little: Caption Flow will caption what the speaker plays instead.

If the video already has subtitles in a language you don’t read, you don’t need to caption the audio at all. Live Translate reads the subtitles on screen and translates them.

Keep a transcript, or don’t

By default, each Live Caption session is saved as text on your phone, so you can look back at what was said in a meeting or lecture, copy it, or delete it. Find them under Saved transcripts. If you’d rather not keep anything, turn off automatic saving there; existing transcripts stay until you delete them.

Caption Flow never stores your audio. With offline captioning it never leaves your phone; with online captioning it’s sent securely to the captioning service you picked and isn’t kept by us. The privacy policy has the full detail.

Quick fixes

• Captions lag or miss words: try a more accurate offline model, or switch to online captioning.
• Wrong language comes out: check the audio language matches what’s being spoken, or use AI captioning to detect it automatically.
• Captions cover the video’s own text: drag the box higher or lower.