local-first · macOS
Captions for everything
you hear. Translated.
A pane of glass that sits beside your meeting — captioning what's said and slipping the translation underneath, half a beat later. Speech recognition runs on your Mac. Translation runs on AI you already pay for.
whisper on-device · your Claude/Codex plan · or a free local model
Cloud captioners stream your meetings to someone else's servers.
OS captions are locked to one platform and one language.
Meeting bots visibly join your call as a participant.
LiveCap is a private overlay only you can see. It's not even in your screen share.
Two ears, on-device. One quiet overlay.
It hears both sides
System audio (them) and your microphone (you) are captured as separate channels — the language is detected automatically.
Whisper, on your Mac
Speech becomes text locally with Metal-accelerated Whisper. No audio ever leaves the machine — there is no LiveCap server.
Translated underneath
Each finished sentence is translated with rolling context and shown a beat later — names and terms stay consistent across the meeting.
The engine is yours. No new subscription.
LiveCap ships no cloud backend. Translation, summaries and suggestions run on one of three engines — your choice, switchable mid-meeting.
Claude / Codex CLI
auto-detectedDrives the CLI you've already signed into — today it's covered by your existing subscription. If Anthropic's billing ever shifts this to Agent SDK credits, LiveCap notices and falls back automatically.
Local model
free · offlineA small instruct model via llama.cpp, bundled on first use. Fully offline, $0 — the safety net that keeps captions running no matter what.
Your own API key
plannedBring an Anthropic or OpenAI key for explicit pay-per-use control, if you'd rather not rely on your subscription.
The part we take personally.
Audio stays put
On-device Whisper. No telemetry, no account, no LiveCap server. The only network call is the translation request to the engine you chose — and with the local model, none at all.
Invisible to your audience
The overlay is excluded from screen capture. Share your screen and your captions stay yours — nobody on the call sees them.
Just local files
Every session is saved as plain Markdown in ~/Documents/LiveCap. Grep them, back them up, point Obsidian at them — or turn it off.
Building in public.
LiveCap is pre-release. The first signed build for macOS (Apple Silicon) is on the way — star the repo to follow along.
brew install --cask livecap soon