Is There a Mac Equivalent of Windows 11 Live Captions with Translation?

The short answer

Partly. macOS has its own Live Captions, and it works much like the Windows version: it captions audio from any app, or from the microphone, on the device. What it does not do is translate. The translation feature that Windows 11 offers on Copilot+ PCs has no single built-in equivalent on a Mac.

Apple's translation features are tied to specific apps: Live Translation works in Messages, FaceTime, and Phone, and Chrome can translate captions for audio playing in Chrome. To translate audio from any app, the way Windows does, you need a third-party app. Alison Workspace is one: it captions the sound your Mac is playing and shows each line with a translation underneath, processed on the device.

What Windows 11 Live Captions does

Microsoft's support page, checked October 14, 2026, describes two layers:

• Live captions, in Windows 11 version 22H2 and later, transcribe audio playing through the PC's default output from any app, and can include your microphone.
• Translation, on Copilot+ PCs running Windows 11 version 24H2 or later, translates live or pre-recorded video in any app from more than 40 languages into English, and from 27 languages into Simplified Chinese.

Microsoft says processing happens on the device and that audio, voice data, and captions do not leave it. It also lists limits: singing is not reliably captioned, system audio takes priority when it plays at the same time as the microphone, and heavy apps can delay or drop captions.

The Mac features that map to it

On a Mac, the same jobs are spread across several features:

• Captions for any app, same language: macOS Live Captions, under System Settings, Accessibility, Live Captions, on Macs with Apple silicon. Apple says audio is processed on the device. Apple's feature-availability page lists eight languages, several only in certain regions: Cantonese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.
• Translation in conversations: Apple's Live Translation, on Macs with Apple Intelligence, translates Messages and one-on-one FaceTime and Phone calls for a limited set of languages. It does not translate a web video, a podcast, or a meeting in another app.
• Translation in the browser: Chrome's Live Caption and Live Translate caption audio playing in Chrome and send captions to Google for translation, according to Chrome Help. They do not cover Safari or native Mac apps.
• Translation for any app: not built in. This is where a third-party app comes in.

Getting Windows-style translated captions on a Mac

Alison Workspace fills the missing piece. It sits in the menu bar, captures the sound your Mac is playing from any app, and shows the spoken line with its translation in a floating window that stays above other apps. You can show both lines, the original only, or the translation only, and adjust font, size, colors, and position. Click-through mode lets you work with the app underneath.

According to its Mac App Store listing checked October 14, 2026:

• It recognizes 100 spoken languages, with Auto Detect that follows a change of language.
• Translation targets come from the Apple language resources installed on your Mac, up to 21 on a current system, so English and Chinese are not the only possible outputs.
• Recognition and translation run on the device, with no account; audio is not uploaded or saved.
• It can caption the microphone, or system audio and microphone together, labeled by source.
• It requires macOS 15 or later and Apple silicon.

Windows and Mac, feature by feature

• Captions for any app: Windows Live Captions; on a Mac, macOS Live Captions or Alison Workspace.
• Translation of any app's audio: Windows on Copilot+ PCs, into English or Simplified Chinese; on a Mac, Alison Workspace, into the targets available on your Mac.
• Showing the original and the translation together: Alison Workspace shows both lines by default.
• Microphone captions: available in both systems and in Alison Workspace.
• On-device processing: Microsoft and Apple both describe their live captions as on-device; Alison Workspace also runs recognition and translation on the device.
• Hardware: Windows translation needs a Copilot+ PC; macOS Live Captions and Alison Workspace need Apple silicon.

Set it up if you are coming from Windows

1. If you only need captions in the language being spoken, turn on macOS Live Captions first; it is free and built in.
2. If you need translation, install Alison Workspace and allow system audio recording when macOS asks.
3. Set recognition to the spoken language, or use Auto Detect for mixed-language audio.
4. Set the translation target to the language you read best.
5. Move the subtitle window where Windows users usually keep the caption bar, at the top or bottom of the screen, and resize it to two or three lines.
6. Learn the global keyboard shortcuts so you can show or hide captions without switching apps.
7. Play a short clip and check that both lines appear before relying on it.

Limits on both systems

Neither system makes every audio source readable. Speech recognition makes mistakes with fast speech, music, and overlapping voices, and a translation can only be as good as the recognized sentence. Microsoft notes that singing is not reliably captioned; the same is true of most recognizers.

On a Mac, subtitles stop while the display is asleep, because macOS stops delivering system audio then. When you caption playback and your microphone together, wear headphones so the microphone does not pick up the playback. Some protected or DRM-controlled content may behave differently depending on the app, browser, system configuration, and content provider, so test the exact service you plan to use.

Alison Workspace shows text only. It does not speak translations aloud and does not add captions to video files.