Live Captions for Any App on your Mac, 25 languages
Real-time captions for any app on your Mac—meetings, podcasts, videos, even that French colleague you can never quite understand
Samuel ROY & Olivier Legris
October 17, 2025
Hey everyone,
You know how YouTube has those perfect subtitles that make everything easier to follow?
Now you have that. For literally any audio on your Mac.
Introducing Live Captions—real-time transcription that works across every app. Zoom calls. Podcasts. Twitch streams. WhatsApp calls. That tutorial video with terrible audio quality.
It's all done locally on your machine, automatically detects languages, and handles multilingual content like a champ.
Why this matters
Ever been in a meeting where someone's accent is thick, or the audio is choppy, or you're just tired and need visual reinforcement? Live Captions has your back.
Watching a podcast while working? Now you can actually follow along without stopping what you're doing.
Learning from international content? No more rewinding 47 times.
How it works
Hit a keyboard shortcut (default: cmd+shift+↓) and boom—captions appear over whatever you're watching or listening to.
Customize everything:
Position on screen
Font size
Background opacity
Frame width
Make it yours.
⚠️ Quick heads up
You'll need to use Parakeet as your voice processor to enable Live Captions (we currently support Parakeet's language set). Easy to switch in Settings > Voice.
Voice Settings
The bonus: Dictate while jamming 🎵
You can now use Dictation while listening to music or podcasts.
Before, Alter would capture everything—your voice AND your Spotify playlist. Not ideal.
Now? Dictation only records your voice. Stay in flow, keep the tunes going, get your thoughts down.
The bonus2 : Next feature decided by the community
This week, we conducted a poll on a Discord server to ask the community about which feature we should develop next.
Remote MCPs won.
We now have 30 days to deliver 😅
We need your feedback
What works? What's janky? What's missing? Hit reply and let us know.
Cheers,
Full Changelog
New Features & Enhancements
Live Captions: Real-time transcription display with toggle shortcut (default:
cmd+shift+↓)Voice Recording: New shortcuts and menubar buttons for starting/stopping/cancelling
Voice Settings UI: Shortcuts now in dedicated window
Models: Claude Haiku 4.5 now available
Bug Fixes & Stability
Audio Processing: Fixed large 2-channel 48000 kHz audio file handling
Clipboard: Prevented interference with complex clipboard data
Notch: Now closes when switching away from Alter
Conversation: Fixed crashes with empty messages array and auto-resize