Microsoft Live Captions

Yes. Microsoft Live Captions is free (free · built into Windows 11).

Microsoft Live Captions runs on Windows. It is not listed for other platforms; check the vendor for anything beyond Windows.

There is nothing to install — Microsoft Live Captions is used in the browser. Create an account on the vendor's site and upload or connect your audio.

Microsoft Live Captions lists 60 languages.

Windows 11 only; on-device captioning quality varies.

Windows 11 users wanting free system-wide accessibility captions.

No. Microsoft Live Captions is a proprietary product. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.

No — Microsoft Live Captions is a Windows application, not a web app. You install it rather than sign in to it.

In this directory Microsoft Live Captions is filed under product as a product.

There is a side-by-side page at /tools/ms-live-captions-alternatives comparing Microsoft Live Captions with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.

Yes. If what you want is transcripts rather than the tool itself, Whipscribe does the same job as a hosted API: submit a file or URL, poll a job id, pull the result as txt, json, srt, vtt or docx. $0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. The automation recipes on this site show it wired to Drive folders, Zoom recordings, S3 buckets and no-code platforms.

Microsoft Live Captions is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training, and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export.

$0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $2.16, a thousand-hour archive is about $720 once. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, so you can see what your recording holds before paying anything.

Three things are moving across the whole speech-to-text market right now: summaries, action items and speaker insights generated on top of the transcript rather than sold separately; private, secured deployment where the audio never leaves a boundary you control; and agent access — transcription exposed as a tool that Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner can call directly. Whipscribe ships all three today: per-job insights, our own servers, and an MCP server.