Live Captions.
Put what you say on screen as you say it. The Companion listens to your microphone and the Live Captions widget shows the words on your overlay, word by word, in your fonts and colors, with lines that settle and roll away the way broadcast captions do.
How it works
Live Captions has two halves. The Companion on your streaming machine captures your microphone and turns speech into text. This widget is the other half: it sits on your overlay and paints that text as it arrives. Add the widget once; everything about when captions run (start, stop, mute, which microphone) lives in the Companion, and everything about how they look lives here.
The widget shows nothing on its own. Install the Companion, open its Live Captions section, pick your microphone and press Start. Live Captions is enabled per account; if the Companion says it is not enabled for yours, get in touch and we will switch it on.
Add it to an overlay
Add the widget
In the editor, open the widget picker and choose Live Captions. Pick one of the templates (Broadcast, Boxed, Minimal, Neon, Retro, Cozy Serif, High Contrast and more) or start blank. It drops onto the canvas as a wide, short box.
Place and size the box
Captions wrap to the width of the box, so make it as wide as you want a line to run and tall enough for your line count. Most streamers park it along the bottom edge, above the chat or facecam.
Style it
Font, size, weight, color, outline, shadow and background are all yours. The preview shows a sample line so you can see the result without talking.
Start captioning
Open the Companion, press Start in Live Captions, and speak. Words appear on the overlay within a moment of you saying them.
Settings
Text
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Family, Size, Weight, Color | The caption font. Any font available to your overlay, including the ones you already use elsewhere. |
| Letter case | Normal, or force everything to UPPER for a broadcast look. |
| Alignment | Left, center or right within the box. |
| Letter spacing, Line height | Fine tuning for readability. A little extra line height helps when you show three or more lines. |
Outline and shadow
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Stroke color, Stroke width | An outline behind each letter. Set the width to 0 to turn it off. With no background box, an outline is what keeps text readable over gameplay. |
| Shadow color, Blur, Offset X, Offset Y | A drop shadow. Blur and both offsets at 0 turns it off. |
Background
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Background | None for bare text, Solid for an opaque box, Semi for a translucent one. Solid and Semi reveal Fill color, Opacity, Padding and Radius. |
| Fill color, Opacity | The box color and how see-through it is. |
| Padding, Radius | Space between the text and the box edge, and how rounded the corners are. |
Layout
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Anchor | Bottom keeps the newest line at the bottom and pushes older lines up and off the top, like TV captions. Top does the reverse. Custom lets you pin the text block at an exact X and Y inside the widget. |
| Max width | How much of the widget box the text may use, as a percentage. Lines wrap at this width. |
| Max lines | How many lines stay on screen. When a new line arrives and the limit is reached, the oldest rolls off. Two or three is the sweet spot; more than that gets hard to follow. |
| Max chars per line | A soft cap on line length, so a very wide box does not produce one endless line. |
Reveal
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reveal mode | Interim shows words as they are spoken, with the lowest delay; the live word can still change slightly as it settles. Final only shows each line once it has settled: steadier and easier to read, at a slightly higher delay. |
| Linger | How long the last caption stays on screen after you stop talking, before it fades. |
| Fade | How long the fade-out takes once a caption is done. |
What the words do on screen
Captions arrive one word at a time and the widget paces them so the line reads smoothly, even when you talk fast. Each new word fades in softly, a line that is still being spoken updates in place (so a half word becomes the whole word rather than jumping), and once a line is complete it stays put while the next one builds under it. If you pause, nothing is lost: the widget uses the quiet moment to catch up. If the browser source was asleep (hidden in OBS, or your machine slept), it skips what nobody watched and picks up at the live line instead of replaying a backlog.
Tips
- Readable over anything: if you prefer no box, use a 2 to 3 px stroke and a soft shadow. If you use a box, Semi at around 50% opacity keeps the game visible behind it.
- Two lines, left aligned is what viewers are used to from TV and the easiest to follow mid-stream.
- Keep the font size honest: captions are read at a glance from the corner of the eye. Go larger than you think, then trim the max width.
- Noisy room? Turn on noise suppression in the Companion rather than fighting it with the widget; see Live Captions in the Companion.
The Companion keeps a transcript of every session on your machine, with search, day by day history, and .txt / .srt export. See Live Captions in the Companion.