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Edge Live Captions & Video Translation

Updated October 14, 2026

Microsoft Edge is the default browser on every Windows 11 PC and the daily home of billions of hours of online video, web meetings, and podcast streams. Edge itself no longer captions or translates video: its real-time video translation was retired in 2026, and the built-in option left is Windows 11 Live Captions. Edge live captions via Live Subtitles take a different approach: they sit outside the browser entirely, captioning anything Edge plays in 50+ languages with optional real-time translation, all from a small floating overlay you can dock anywhere on your screen.

Edge real-time video translation was retired — what to use instead

In 2024 Microsoft announced real-time video translation for Edge: on-device subtitles and dubbing for videos on sites such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Coursera, for a handful of language pairs and on PCs with at least 12 GB of RAM. It did not last. The Edge release notes announced its retirement in Edge 152 (August 27, 2026) as a gradual rollout, and the Edge 155 notes (October 8, 2026) state that it has been retired. The LiveVideoTranslationEnabled policy is being deprecated as well.

What is left, and how it compares:

• Windows 11 Live Captions (Win + Ctrl + L) — free, captions any system audio, including Edge. Translation is limited: on Copilot+ PCs it translates into English (and Simplified Chinese), not between any pair of languages.
• Site subtitles — YouTube auto-captions and auto-translate work on YouTube only; most other sites have nothing.
• Live Subtitles — a Windows app that captions whatever Edge plays, on any site, in 50+ languages, and shows the original line and a translation together. Paid, with free minutes to try it.

How to add live captions to Edge in 3 steps

1. Download Live Subtitles from the Microsoft Store and launch the app.
2. Select "System Audio" — captures audio from any tab in Edge without a browser extension.
3. Play any video, audio, or web call in Edge — captions appear instantly in a floating overlay.

Captions for every site, not just the popular ones

Site-provided subtitles cover the big platforms, but the long tail of the web — niche language news, regional university lecture portals, smaller podcast players, embedded video on corporate sites, archived broadcast media — is where captioning consistently breaks. Live Subtitles does not care about the source site. It reads what Windows is playing through the audio mixer, so any tab in Edge that produces sound is captioned identically:

• YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and other video platforms.
• News sites with embedded video reports in any language.
• University lecture portals and on-demand course platforms.
• Web-based meeting platforms (Zoom Web, Meet, Webex, Teams web client).
• Podcast web players and embedded audio players.
• Live broadcast portals for radio and TV streams.

Multi-language web video without browser plugins

Watching a French news broadcast, a German current-affairs analysis, a Korean academic talk, or a Japanese tech conference stream on the web traditionally requires either luck (the site has decent subtitles) or work (find an .srt online and sync it manually). Live Subtitles' dual subtitle mode replaces both: original speech on the top line, translation in your stronger language on the bottom line, both updating in real time on top of whatever Edge is playing.

Works with Edge Workspaces, InPrivate, and split-screen

Edge offers a long list of advanced features — Workspaces for sharing browsing sessions, vertical tabs, split-screen for two tabs side by side, multiple profiles, InPrivate windows. Each of these can confuse browser-extension-based caption tools because the extension may not load consistently. Live Subtitles is unaffected: it is a separate Windows app reading the same audio output, so it works the same in every Edge feature, every profile, and every window mode.

Privacy: no browser data access

Because Live Subtitles is not an Edge extension, it has no access to your browsing history, cookies, passwords, or any other browser-side data. It cannot read the URL of a tab; it cannot see form contents; it cannot inspect anything in the DOM. The only data flowing in is the audio output stream — the same stream that powers your speakers — and the only data flowing out is the resulting transcript shown on your screen. Supported recognition and translation languages include English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Ukrainian — among 50+ total.

Download Live Subtitles — Try It Free

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