NotchLive — Private Live Captions for Mac

NotchLive is a Mac app that provides private, on-device live captions for anyone who finds spoken audio easier to follow as text — whether in meetings, lessons, videos, podcasts or calls. Built by a founder with ADHD, it works as an accessibility and focus-support utility rather than a treatment or medical tool: by turning speech into a live, visible caption trail, it gives users an external record they can glance back at to regain context when attention drifts, which makes it particularly useful for people with ADHD, auditory processing differences, or anyone who loses the thread of fast spoken conversation.

The app captions system audio or microphone input from any application — Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and any video or podcast — using on-device Whisper AI, with captions displayed in the MacBook notch, a floating Focus view, or an expandable Timeline that can be scrolled, searched, copied and exported while new captions keep arriving. Privacy is built in at the core: audio never leaves the Mac, speech recognition runs locally via Whisper and CoreML, there is no required account and no cloud processing of audio or transcripts.

Core captioning is free forever, including all Whisper models, system and microphone capture, and unlimited use, with a one-time Pro upgrade adding real-time translation across twenty languages, saved transcripts, Voice Notes, Meeting Intelligence and transcript export. NotchLive transcribes more than ninety languages, requires macOS 14 or later, and runs best on Apple Silicon. As an adjustment tool it flexes the environment to the user — making spoken information followable on their own terms, under their own control — rather than asking the user to change how they process it.