Live Captions & Translation for Events and Meetings

ConferenceCaptioning is live captioning and real-time translation software for in-person conferences, events, meetings, seminars, and church services. It turns a speaker's audio into captions on stage screens and on attendees' own phones, with translation into 50+ languages. It is built by the team behind the BeAware Deaf Assistant app.

Both. The native app runs on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and performs best there, because it uses Apple's Neural Engine for on-device AI. On Windows, or any computer with Google Chrome, the ConferenceCaptioning Chrome extension runs speech recognition on-device too. Hot-failover redundancy currently requires Apple devices.

Yes. Beyond conferences, teams use it for board meetings, all-hands, town halls, trainings, and hybrid sessions. Connect the room's microphone or sound system to the host computer, and attendees follow live captions or translations on the room screen or their own phones by scanning a QR code.

Captions typically appear in under one second (sub-1000 ms) from the moment words are spoken. That's fast enough to use as on-stage captions without the text visibly lagging behind the speaker.

No. Attendees scan a QR code displayed at the venue and read live captions or translations in their phone's web browser. There's no app, no account, and no email required.

Yes. Installing ConferenceCaptioning turns a Mac, iPad, or iPhone into an AI captioning and translation server, so transcription, translation, and captions on every screen connected to the same local network run with no internet at all, even in a fully air-gapped setup. Attendees usually read along on their own phones through a QR code to a public link, which uses their mobile data so they don't have to join anything. They can also join the local Wi-Fi to stay fully offline.

No. ConferenceCaptioning runs transcription and translation on-device, so there's no dedicated internet line, wired drop, or reserved bandwidth to rent from the venue. Venue internet lines can be a significant line item per room, so skipping them is often one of the biggest savings compared with cloud captioning tools.

You can choose from a pool of 50+ languages and run up to 5 translations at the same time. Each attendee picks the language they want to read.

ConferenceCaptioning provides the real-time captioning and post-event transcripts that events use to meet accessibility requirements under the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), the ACA (Accessible Canada Act), and the EAA (European Accessibility Act).

There's a free plan to get started. The Standard plan is $100 per day for smaller events or $400 per month billed annually, with no streaming time limit. Enterprise pricing is available on request. Human CART captioners typically charge $150–$300 per hour plus booking minimums, and they don't include multilingual translation.

Yes. The caption feed can be added as a browser source in OBS Studio, vMix, ProPresenter, and H2R Graphics, including a chroma-key background for transparent lower-third overlays. Audio comes in from your existing sound board via USB, XLR interface, Dante, or NDI.

Yes. AV teams can start, stop, show, and hide captions and translations on screen from an Elgato Stream Deck or Bitfocus Companion, so the operator never has to walk back to the captioning computer mid-show.

A backup Mac or iPad on the same local network takes over automatically. The caption display checks the primary every 500 milliseconds, and if it stops responding, captions switch to the backup in about two seconds, with no page refresh, while an alert email goes to your AV lead. Hot failover is included in the Enterprise plan. See the hot-failover setup guide.

No. The AI runs on your device, not in a data center: speech is transcribed and translated on the machine in the room, and the audio is never uploaded, stored, or used to train AI. Most cloud captioning tools send every word to remote servers. Transcripts are saved to the cloud only if the organizer chooses to.