How to Get Live Subtitles on FaceTime Calls
Ever wanted live subtitles on your FaceTime calls? Navi , a companion app to FaceTime, lets you add it to your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The app cleverly uses Apple’s SharePlay feature to show real-time subtitles during video calls with friends, which is another good reason to use FaceTime .
For people with hearing impairments, live captioning during a call can be a game changer. Likewise, this subtitle feature can be very useful for people who find it difficult to follow spoken English (for example, those who are not native speakers of English). We tried using Navi to call our friends and found the app to work well on both iPhone and Mac.
How to create live subtitles during FaceTime calls
To get started, open Navi and make a FaceTime audio or video call. On Mac, you can click the subtitle icon in FaceTime to enable Navi subtitles. On iPhone, you can use SharePlay to get the most out of Navi. Remember that you need to update to iOS 15.1 or later to be able to use SharePlay.
The quality of the subtitles is pretty good as long as you use standard English phrases and don’t mix languages. This is enough for most people. English speakers may notice that their accent lowers the accuracy of the Navi subtitles, but it’s still good enough to be used.
The app is free to download and its live subtitling feature was free to use at the time of writing, but this may change at a later date. We were unable to test the live translation feature for friends or family members who speak any of the non-English languages supported by Navi, but you can try it and see if it’s good enough to chat with your international friends. It’s worth remembering that Navi only translates subtitles into the language of your choice, so it’s not like the universal translator from Star Trek .
Live translation is a paid Navi feature that costs $ 3.99 for up to 100,000 characters and $ 14.99 for up to 250,000 characters. You can buy more Transfer Tokens if you exceed these character limits.