Live Captions.
Caption your stream from your own microphone. The Companion listens, turns your speech into text, and sends it to the Live Captions widget on your overlay as you talk. It also keeps a transcript of every session on your machine, with search, day by day history and export.
Before you start
Live Captions is enabled per account. Open the Live Captions section in the Companion sidebar: if it says captions are not enabled for this account, get in touch and we will switch it on. You also need the Live Captions widget on an overlay, or there is nowhere for the words to go.
Every account has a monthly allowance of caption minutes (600 by default). The Companion shows how much is left, only counts minutes while captions are actually running, and resets on the 1st.
Start captioning
Pick your microphone
Under Audio input, choose the device you talk into. The level meter moves when it hears you, so you can confirm it is the right one before you go live. If the device is unplugged, the picker tells you.
Press Start
Captions begin streaming to your overlay. The On overlay now card at the top mirrors exactly what viewers see, including the line still being spoken, so you never have to check the stream to know it is working.
Press Stop when you are done
Or let the Companion do it: see Automation below.
Audio input
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Microphone | The input device the Companion captions. Change it any time; a running session switches over with a brief gap. |
| Noise suppression | Reduces steady background noise like fans, hum and keyboards before captioning. Off by default. Turn it on if captions pick up noise or mishear in a loud room; it is tuned to soften noise rather than clip quiet word endings. |
Mute and sync
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mute hotkey | A global shortcut that mutes and unmutes captioning from anywhere, even with the Companion in the background. Click the field to rebind it. |
| Sync with OBS source | Pick the OBS audio source you mute when you step away, and captions mute whenever it is muted. The Companion follows the source itself, not its name, so renaming it in OBS does not break the link. It connects to OBS over obs-websocket; enter the password from OBS under Settings if you set one. |
With OBS sync on, the Companion only captions while it can see that the source is live. If OBS closes or the connection drops, captions pause after a short grace period rather than captioning something you muted; they resume on their own when OBS is back.
Automation
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Auto-start when I go live | Begin captioning the moment your stream starts, so you never forget to press Start. |
| Auto-end when my stream ends | Stop captioning and close the session when you go offline. |
History
Every session is written to a transcript log on your machine, line by line with timestamps. Browse it day by day with the arrows, search within a day, and jump back to the live view with Back to live. Export any day as .txt or as .srt subtitles ready for your editor.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Keep transcripts for | How many days of history to keep, from 1 to 90 (7 by default). Older days are removed automatically. Transcripts are stored only on this machine and never uploaded. |
| VOD links | On by default. When you are live, each line’s timestamp becomes a link to that exact moment in your Twitch VOD, so "what did I say around then" is one click. Lines from a past stream whose VOD has since expired show "VOD no longer available". |
When captions stop on their own
Live Captions would rather stop than caption the wrong thing, and it always tells you why. If captions stop for a reason you did not choose, a notice card appears at the top of the section naming the cause: OBS connection lost, OBS source missing, microphone disconnected, microphone blocked, caption minutes used up, captions not enabled, or the caption service lost. The card stays until the problem is genuinely fixed; when it is, it either turns green with Captions resumed and clears itself, or tells you captions are stopped and offers a Start button. Pressing Stop yourself clears every card.
Privacy
Your microphone is only captured while captions are running. During that time the audio is streamed to our caption service to be turned into text and is not stored by OverlayThing. The text goes to your overlay and to the transcript on your machine; we keep only a count of caption minutes for your allowance. Captions are verbatim: nothing is rewritten, filtered or summarized on the way to your overlay.
Everything about the appearance (font, box, line count, outline) lives on the Live Captions widget in the editor.