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OBS Live Captions & AI Subtitles for Streamers

Streaming with OBS is second nature — but keeping up with game audio, co-commentators, or an international audience can be a challenge. OBS live captions via Live Subtitles give you a real-time AI caption overlay that runs right alongside OBS Studio, no plugin required. Whether you need to monitor game dialogue in another language or improve accessibility for yourself during a marathon session, Live Subtitles works transparently at the Windows audio level.

How to set up live captions with OBS in 3 steps

1. Download Live Subtitles from the Microsoft Store and launch it alongside OBS Studio.
2. Select "System Audio" to caption game or desktop audio, or "Microphone" to caption your own voice.
3. Start streaming or recording in OBS as usual — the caption overlay stays visible on your monitor and stays on top of all windows.

Personal caption overlay vs. stream output captions

It is important to understand what Live Subtitles does and does not do, so you can decide if it fits your setup. Live Subtitles is a personal overlay — captions appear on your screen only, not burned into the video output that viewers watch. This is intentional: many streamers want a private caption feed while keeping a clean stream layout for their audience.

If you want captions to appear in the stream output that viewers see, OBS Studio has its own built-in closed captions plugin that can route captions to compatible platforms. For the most common use cases — monitoring audio yourself, following a game story in a second language, or staying focused during long sessions — Live Subtitles is the faster, simpler choice.

• No OBS plugin to install or configure in the OBS settings panel.
• Works with any audio OBS is capturing — game audio, browser audio, desktop audio.
• Caption overlay stays on top even in borderless fullscreen games.
• No dependency on streaming platform API keys or third-party services.

Caption game audio and monitor in any language

One of the most popular uses among streamers is captioning game audio in a second language. If you are streaming a Japanese RPG without an English dub, or following the in-game lore of a title with dense dialogue, Live Subtitles can transcribe and translate game audio in real time. Select "System Audio", choose the source language (e.g. Japanese), set the translation target to English, and dual subtitles appear on screen — original dialogue on top, translation below.

This works equally well for co-op games where teammates speak a different language, or for watching stream VODs alongside your own recording session. Supported recognition and translation languages include English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, and 40+ more.

Accessibility for streamers

Accessibility tools are often discussed from the viewer's perspective, but streamers benefit from them too. Streamers with hearing loss or who stream in noisy environments regularly miss audio cues — alerts, in-game voice lines, Discord notifications — that sighted-hearing viewers catch instantly. Live Subtitles turns those audio events into readable text without interrupting the stream workflow.

Because the overlay is always on top and fully repositionable, you can dock it to a corner of your monitor or place it below the game viewport so it never blocks your HUD. For dual-monitor setups, you can move the overlay to a secondary screen entirely.

Works alongside all OBS features

Live Subtitles does not interfere with OBS's scene management, filters, or encoding pipeline. It reads audio at the Windows mixer level, which means it runs independently regardless of how your OBS scenes are configured:

• Works during live streams on Twitch, YouTube, and any RTMP destination.
• Works during local recordings in OBS.
• Works with OBS Studio's virtual camera output.
• Works with OBS Replay Buffer sessions.

Start Live Subtitles once, leave it running, and your entire streaming session becomes captioned — no scene switching, no hotkeys, no additional setup.

Download Live Subtitles — Free Trial

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