How to generate live captions, as well as translated captions on your windows 11 machine

A buddy mentioned that he wished he had the time to learn Japanese properly and was able watch Japanese shows without any subtitles. I suggested to him why not just auto-generate for shows that did not have subtitles, it helps him practice it too.

So I decided to share the close-caption and auto-translation workflow as below, hope this helps anyone looking for a solution.

Step 1:

you will need a windows 11 computer / laptop (if you have a certified Copilot laptop or computer the steps are easier, just use the live captions app natively to translate).

Step 2:

open Live captions app on your windows 11 computer and download the desired language you wish to translate (japanese, chinese, etc) the app needs the files to properly 'listen' and 'show' the captions of whatever video you're playing on the screen.

 

 

click on change language 

click on the drop down menu to the left of the 'continue' button to select your preferred language as below

the language will be automatically downloaded once you select it if it is not already downloaded on your computer. 

Step 3:

goto this link and download the relevant install file for your machine (hint: most windows machines on intel/amd cpus are x86-based unless you've got a fancy snapdragon ARM64 one) place the file somewhere accessible or pin it to your taskbar if you intend to access the app frequently.

 

this is how the file icon looks like once you have downloaded it (double click to run)

 Step 4:

 

it should look like this. the top bar will show the captioned text in it's native language

the lower and larger textbox will show the translated text into your desired language, click on the settings (little gear icon below the home icon on the left) to set them accordingly

I've not used the app for longer than 10mins at a time so far, so I'm not sure if there are API limits but there's also the option to run an Ollama server and run a local LLM to do the translation as well. 

that's a whole other topic and post for another day, I'll link setting up an Ollama or LM studio environment for chatting locally another time.

hope this was useful!