Hyperacusis can often leave people very sensitive to digital audio. Many sufferers depend on captions, this article shows you how to enable captions on most devices.

Web Browsers

Chrome can caption almost any content with sound, to enable it follow Use Live Caption in Chrome. When it’s enabled a small floating box will pop up on your screen showing captions for any audio playing. It’s also possible in Edge, using these instructions: How to Enable and Customize Live Captions in Microsoft Edge. Firefox and Safari don’t support this sadly.

iPhone

Apple has a guide here on enabling captions: Display subtitles and captions on iPhone. A nice trick for iPhones is to add Accessibility Shortcuts in control center so you can easily toggle captions on and off. Otherwise it is inconvenient to go into settings to turn them off when you don’t need them.

MacOS

It is also possible on new Mac’s with the M1 and M2 chips, see the following guide Use Live Captions on Mac

Windows 11

Windows 11 also has support for captioning, follow these instructions: Use live captions to better understand audio

Android

Google has a guide for enabling captions here: Translate speech to text with Live Caption

A useful trick is to press the volume down button, in many phones there will be a caption icon which allows you to toggle live captions on and off

Using Whisper

For other content, if you can’t find captions OpenAI Whisper can be a good alternative. It typically performs much better than the live captioning tools above however is harder to setup and requires you to download a video first.  https://freesubtitles.ai/ is a useful website which allows you to use it for free.

Contact Us if you have any other tips for using live captions. We will try to keep this page up to date.