Reading captions¶

Who this is for: users — anyone watching or reading captions. If you run the session, see Capturing speech instead.

You do not need to install anything. Someone sends you a link, and you open it in a browser.

What you see¶

Captions are the spoken words written on screen. They appear a few seconds behind the speaker, because speech is collected in short chunks before it is turned into text. They are usually good but not perfect — names, accents and crosstalk can come out wrong.

Captions can show up in a few places:

On a screen at the event — a projector or display, often as an overlay with no buttons or menus.
In a stream — added to a broadcast with software such as OBS.
On your own device — a phone or laptop you open the link on.

Choosing a language¶

An overlay link can show the captions in a language other than the spoken one. If the event offers it, you may have a link per language (for example one link for English and another for Spanish) — open the one you need. Some links can show the original and the translation together.

See Translation and text-to-speech for what is available.

If nothing appears¶

Make sure you opened the full link, including anything after the ?.
Check your internet connection and try reloading the page.
If the screen stays empty, tell the person running the session — the problem is usually at their end, not yours.

For the concepts behind it all, see Concepts in plain words.