Free in shared sessions

Read it in your language

Hearing Buddy translates captions as people speak, right on your phone. Choose the language you read — and in a shared session, everyone chooses their own, independently, at no cost.

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Following a conversation you can barely hear is hard enough. Following it in your second language is a different job again, and doing both at once is why so many people quietly stop joining in. Live translation removes one of the two problems: whatever is being said around you, you read it in the language you think in.

10
Reading languages, translated as people speak
On-device
Translation happens on your phone, not in a cloud
Offline
Works with no signal once the language is downloaded

Translated as they speak, not after

Translation runs alongside the captions rather than in front of them. A caption appears as soon as the words are recognised, then swaps to your reading language a moment later — so waiting on a translation never holds up the transcript. You are reading the conversation as it happens, not a version of it that arrives late.

It is built on Apple's on-device translation, which means the text is processed on your phone rather than sent to a translation service. Your conversation stays where your conversation should be.

A table where everyone reads differently

This is where it becomes something more than a convenience. In a shared session each person chooses their own reading language, independently of everyone else. The same spoken conversation can be read in several languages at the same time — one person following in Portuguese, another in Korean, another in the original.

A family dinner spanning three generations and two languages stops being a series of side-translations and becomes one conversation everybody is actually in. Inside a shared session this is free for every person at the table.

How Share Captions works →

On your own, with Buddy+

When you are captioning solo, translation is part of Buddy+. You choose the language being spoken and the language you want to read, and Hearing Buddy handles the rest. Alerts, conversation summaries, and session titles can appear in your reading language too, so the whole app speaks to you the way you prefer to read.

This is the one place we do charge, and we would rather be straightforward about the line: translating a room full of people is free for everyone in it, and translating your own private captions is a paid feature.

Downloads once, then works anywhere

The first time you use a language, its model downloads to your phone. That download is shared with Apple's Translate app, so if you already use Translate you may find the language is there. After that, translation runs entirely offline.

That means it keeps working on a plane, in a rural clinic, on a hospital ward with no usable Wi-Fi, or in any of the other places where the conversation you most need to follow happens to be the hardest to reach.

How to translate a conversation

  1. 1

    Choose your reading language

    Pick the language you want captions to appear in. In a shared session this is yours alone and does not change what anyone else sees.

  2. 2

    Download it once

    The first use downloads a language model to your phone. It is a one-time step, and Apple's Translate app shares the same downloads.

  3. 3

    Start the conversation

    Captions appear as people speak and swap into your language a moment later. Nothing is held up waiting on a translation.

  4. 4

    Switch any time

    Changing your reading language mid-conversation is fine, and affects only your screen.

What it can't do

Machine translation is genuinely useful and genuinely imperfect. Here is where the line sits.

It is not an interpreter

For medical consent, legal proceedings, or anything where a misread sentence has real consequences, use a qualified human interpreter. Machine translation loses nuance, idiom, and sometimes negation — and you often cannot tell from the output that it has.

Cantonese can't be translated

Cantonese is supported as a caption language but not as a translation source, so it will not carry across into other reading languages.

Two steps, two chances to slip

A translated caption is speech recognition followed by translation. An error in the first stage carries into the second, so a misheard word can come out as a confidently wrong translated word. In a noisy room, treat it as the gist rather than the transcript.

Ten reading languages, not every language

English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. If yours is not on that list, a cloud-based app with wider coverage will serve you better and we would rather point you there.

The details

Price
Free for everyone in a shared session; part of Buddy+ when captioning on your own
Reading languages
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
Caption languages
18 language and regional options; Cantonese captions cannot be translated
Processing
On your device, using Apple's translation; offline after a one-time download
Requires
iOS 26.0 or later

Questions people ask

Do I have to pay to read in another language?

Not in a shared session — translation is free there for everyone taking part, with no Buddy+ needed by anyone. Translating your own captions when you are listening alone is a Buddy+ feature.

Which languages can I read in?

Ten: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Does translation need an internet connection?

Only for the one-time language download. After that it runs entirely on your phone, so it keeps working with no signal at all. The downloads are shared with Apple's Translate app, so you may already have the language you need.

Does translating slow the captions down?

No. The caption appears first in the spoken language and swaps into your reading language a moment later, so a translation is never holding up the transcript.

Can I use this for a medical appointment?

For following along, yes, and many people do. For anything you are being asked to consent to or sign, ask for a qualified interpreter — you are entitled to one in most healthcare settings, and machine translation can drop exactly the nuance that matters. Use it as support, not as the official record.

Why is Cantonese missing from translation?

Cantonese is supported for captioning, so you can read Cantonese speech as Cantonese text. It is not available as a translation source, so it will not convert into the other reading languages. We would rather flag that up front than have you discover it at dinner.

Keep reading

Try it for yourself

Captions are free and unlimited, with no account and no credit card. Download it and see whether it helps.

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Requires iOS 26 or later · iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac & Vision Pro