Live Transcribe

Deaf and hard-of-hearing users who need free, real-time captions in any setting.

Live Transcribe is Google's accessibility-first transcription app, not a podcast tool. It runs on Android, captions ambient speech in 120-plus languages in real time, and flags sounds like alarms and baby cries. There is no export workflow, no API, and no Mac or iOS version — just the most-used free transcription app in the world.

Live Transcribe is one of the strongest accessibility apps Google has ever shipped, and it is not a podcasting tool. The app captions ambient speech in real time on an Android phone, supports more than 120 languages and dialects, and runs offline on Pixels and newer devices with the right language pack installed. Dual-screen mode on foldables lets two people sit on either side of the device and watch the conversation transcribe live. None of that helps you produce a podcast directly. There is no export to SRT, no transcript history beyond the recent buffer, and no API to embed the engine somewhere else. What it is genuinely useful for is field work where a deaf or hard-of-hearing collaborator needs to participate in an interview, or for a host doing a quick accuracy check during a live event. The accuracy on clean English speech is competitive with paid services; on heavy accents or technical vocabulary it tracks the general state of mobile speech recognition. Worth installing on any Android device whether or not you ever need it for podcasting. For actual transcript production, you still need Whisper, a hosted service, or YouTube's free auto-caption pipeline. Worth flagging that the iPhone equivalent — Live Captions on iOS — is now broadly comparable for English; the Android version still wins on language breadth.