I rely on captions or live speech to text to understand spoken audio. For the last several years, I’ve used some combination of hacks and workaround

Apple’s Live Captions are often worse than nothing

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Style Pass

2024-11-26 18:00:05

I rely on captions or live speech to text to understand spoken audio. For the last several years, I’ve used some combination of hacks and workarounds to get captions anywhere I needed them—usually with an audio tool like Loopback to create a virtual audio source that I could pipe into Google Meet and take advantage of their real-time speech to text.

I’ve long been convinced that this is a nonsensical workaround for an accessibility feature that really should just be part of the core OS, so I was delighted when Apple released their Live Captions beta for iOS and Mac OS.

In theory, Live Captions on Mac OS should be the perfect, magical replacement for all these hacky workarounds. There’s a few design decisions that feel bang on with how I’d expect captions to work, like how they appear in a little modal that’s fixed above other windows and can be dragged anywhere on the screen.

And in theory, since it’s integrated into the OS itself, any audio source could be captioned—video calls, Slack huddles, videos, even phone calls over wifi.