Where the platform has nothing to offer
No subtitle track, or a machine track translated one word at a time. SubLive translates whole sentences with the context of what came before, which is a different quality of sentence.
Use case
Videos and podcasts, in a language you read
Plenty of what is worth listening to has no subtitles at all, or has automatic ones that were translated word by word. SubLive captions whatever the player is playing — and can show the original underneath, which is how people end up using it to learn the language instead.
Free minutes after you confirm your email. No card required.
What makes this case different
Podcasts while you work
The subtitle window stays above other applications, so a podcast in a background tab can be read while you are doing something else entirely.
Two languages, one screen
Show the original under the translation. For anyone learning the language, this is the whole feature: you hear it, you see it, you see what it means.
How it works here
Play it in a Chrome tab
A video, a podcast in a web player, an audiobook, a radio stream.
Turn on “show original”
Optional, but it is what turns watching into practice. Font size and line count are yours to set.
Keep the text if it was worth keeping
Save the transcript, export it, or ask for a summary. Off by default — nothing is kept unless you say so.
What it will not do
- What you get is for personal use. A translated transcript of someone else's video is still their work — publishing it or selling it is not yours to decide.
- Services that protect their content (paid film and TV platforms among them) do not give the audio to an extension. SubLive does not circumvent that protection and will not work there.
- Songs, sound effects and heavily edited audio produce poor results. This is speech recognition, not a music transcriber.
Questions people ask about this
- Does it work on YouTube?
- Yes, on anything that plays in the tab — including live streams, where YouTube's own translated captions are usually not available at all.
- Does it work on Netflix and other paid film services?
- Assume not. Those services protect their audio, and an extension is not given a usable copy of it. SubLive does not try to get around content protection, so it either works on a site or it does not start.
- Can I use it to learn a language?
- That is one of the most common uses. Turn on “show original” and you get the sentence as it was said and as it means, on the same screen. Save the transcript and you have the vocabulary of the episode afterwards.