Parakeet

Live captions for everything your Mac plays: videos, calls, podcasts. Translated as you listen, and all on your Mac.

Download for Mac GitHub

Free and open source · Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later

What it does

• Captions for any app

  Whatever makes sound gets captions, in a floating box you can drag anywhere. It hides itself when nothing is speaking.

• About 30 languages

  Korean, Japanese, English and many more, detected on their own. No need to pick one first.

• Translation

  Pick one of about 20 languages and the translation shows large, with the original underneath.

• Stays on your Mac

  Speech recognition and translation both run on your Mac. No audio or text ever leaves it.

• Barely uses power

  Runs entirely on the Neural Engine: about 0.12 W and a tenth of one CPU core while captioning, and about 1 mW when nothing is playing.

• Out of the way

  Lives in the menu bar. Toggle captions with ⌘L or from a terminal, and it updates itself.

First launch

1. Open Parakeet.dmg and drag Parakeet into Applications.
2. Parakeet isn't notarized by Apple, so macOS blocks the first launch. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
3. The welcome window asks for permission to hear system audio, then downloads the speech model (about 640 MB).