Speech-to-text does two different jobs for deaf and hard of hearing people, and confusing them leads to disappointment. Live captioning puts words on a screen while someone is talking, so you can take part in the moment. A transcript is a record produced from a recording, so you can read afterwards, at your own pace, what you could not follow at the time. Both are useful. Neither replaces the other, and neither replaces a human interpreter or a professional captioner when the stakes are high.
This article explains where each one fits, how ThinkScribe gives you both from a single recording, what transcribing on your own device changes, and, plainly, what a transcription app is not. For the wider picture of speech to text on Apple devices, see the complete voice to text guide.
Live captions and transcripts are not the same thing
Live captions appear as the words are spoken. They are what you want in a live lecture, a conversation, or a talk you are attending. Apple builds a system-level live captions feature into iPhone, iPad and Mac for supported languages. It works across apps and on audio playing on the device. A video conferencing tool usually offers its own captions inside a call. Professional CART, real-time captioning typed by a trained captioner, remains the accurate option where accuracy is not negotiable. Automatic live captions are fast and imperfect: they revise words as more context arrives, they struggle with crosstalk and heavy accents, and they rarely tell you who is speaking.
A transcript is produced from a recording. It arrives after the fact, and in exchange it is far more useful as a document: it can be read at your own pace, re-read, searched, quoted, corrected, exported, and shared with the people who were in the room. It can separate and name speakers. It can be summarized down to the decisions and the action items.
A practical setup uses both, and in ThinkScribe they come from the same recording. While you record on iPhone, iPad or Mac, the words appear on screen as they are spoken (Live Text is on by default). When you tap Stop, the app makes the full transcript from the whole recording and separates the speakers. The live text is there to help you follow along; the transcript made after you stop is the version to read, check and keep. Live transcription on iPhone covers the live side in more detail.
How to get live text and a transcript in ThinkScribe
- Open ThinkScribe on your iPhone. On the Record tab, check the language chip next to the record button and pick the language that will be spoken (there are 28). If Auto-detect is offered, you can use it. Live text covers most of these languages; a few are not covered yet and some need a short download first, and the app tells you when that is the case. The full transcript is made either way.
- Tap the translate icon next to the language chip and make sure Show Live Text is on. It is on by default.
- If you want your attention caught when someone addresses you, turn on Notice My Name, which marks your name in the live text when someone says it.
- Put the phone close to whoever is speaking and tap record. Keep ThinkScribe on screen while you read along: live text pauses when the app is in the background, although the recording continues.
- If the conversation is in another language, open the same sheet and pick your language under Translate Live to read it in yours. It uses Apple's Translation, provided by Apple, and some languages need a one-time download.
- Tap Stop. The app shows "Transcribing..." and then "Identifying speakers...". When "Transcript ready" appears, tap Open, or find the recording in the Library later.
Ask before you record. Recording a conversation is a normal accommodation to request, and most people say yes when you explain why, but the laws about recording differ by country and by state, and consent is the right starting point regardless of what the law requires where you are.
Where a transcript helps
Conversations you want to be able to check later
A doctor's appointment, a meeting with a landlord, a conversation with a bank, a family discussion about care arrangements. These are the conversations where missing one clause matters, where asking someone to repeat themselves for the fourth time is exhausting, and where you may want to reread the details a week later. A phone on the table, recording, lets you follow along with live text in the moment and gives you a transcript to read afterwards. The audio is kept with it, so you can tap any line to hear that moment again and check anything that looks wrong.
Lectures and classes
Lecture capture is the classic case: the room is large, the acoustics are poor, the lecturer walks around, and note-taking and lipreading compete for the same attention. Live text on the phone helps you keep up during the session; the transcript afterwards separates following from note-taking. It is also searchable: the Library's search field looks through the full text of every transcript, so revising for an exam means searching for a term instead of scrubbing through six hours of audio. Search inside audio recordings shows how that works across a whole term.
If your institution provides a captioner, a note-taker or lecture recordings, use those first; they are provided for a reason and they are usually better. A personal transcript is the fallback for everything the provision does not cover: the seminar, the lab session, the corridor conversation afterwards.
Meetings you are in the room for
Meetings are where automatic transcripts pay off the most, because so much of the content is procedural: who agreed to what, by when. Speaker separation matters here more than anywhere else. A wall of undifferentiated text is hard work; a transcript that shows who said each line, with names you have assigned once, reads like minutes. On top of that, a summary with its action items answers the question you actually have, which is what am I supposed to do now, without reading forty minutes of text. Record an in-person meeting on iPhone covers phone placement and the rest of the setup.
Captions for recorded media
If you are the person publishing a video, a podcast, a training module or a recorded talk, captions are what make it usable by a deaf or hard of hearing audience, and useful to everyone else. That is the other half of speech to text for deaf and hard of hearing users: one half is reading what was said to you, the other is making sure what you publish can be read. Export SRT or VTT from a transcript and you have a caption file you can attach to the video: SRT for players and editors, VTT for the web. The SRT subtitles guide covers the format and the timing fixes, and transcribing a video to text covers the import and export loop for MP4 and MOV files.
Two things worth doing before you publish captions:
- Read them through. Automatic captions with uncorrected names, numbers and technical terms are worse than they look. A caption that quietly puts the wrong word in a speaker's mouth is a real problem, not a cosmetic one. Tapping a line (clicking it on a Mac) to hear that exact moment makes the check quick.
- Publish a text transcript alongside the video too. Some readers want the document rather than the captions, screen readers handle it better, and it is searchable. Markdown, PDF and plain text work on every device, and a Mac can also export a Word document; the export guide lists the formats.
Why on-device transcription matters here in particular
The conversations that most need captioning are frequently the ones you would least like to hand to a company. Think of medical appointments, benefits assessments, legal advice, disciplinary meetings and family arrangements. They carry health information and other people's words, and the other people in the room did not choose a transcription vendor.
ThinkScribe transcribes on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. There is no account, and your recordings and transcripts are never sent to us. iCloud sync is optional and off unless you turn it on. Practically, it also means transcription works offline: in a hospital basement with no signal, on a plane, or in a building where the guest Wi-Fi is unusable, which is a real accessibility consideration and not an abstract one. The on-device versus cloud comparison sets out the mechanics of the distinction, including the difference between "encrypted in transit" and "transcribed on your device".
There is a second reason. Access needs are personal information. With no account and no copy of your recordings on our side, what you record and read is not a profile anyone else holds. If other people use your phone, App Lock can require Face ID before ThinkScribe opens. A recording's title and first lines can appear in Spotlight and in ThinkScribe's widgets on your device; to keep one out, choose Hide from Widgets and Spotlight in its menu, or turn on Privacy Mode in Settings for all of them.
What this is not
Being explicit here is more respectful than being vague.
- Not a hearing aid, and not a hearing device of any kind. It does not amplify, filter or process sound for listening. It has no medical function and makes no medical claim.
- Not a medical device, and not a substitute for audiological care or for advice from a professional.
- Not a live captioner for phone calls or other apps. Live text shows what you are recording in ThinkScribe; on iPhone the app does not caption your phone calls or audio playing in other apps. On a Mac, ThinkScribe can record the audio of a Zoom, Teams or FaceTime call through system audio, and you read the transcript after you stop.
- Not a replacement for an interpreter or a professional captioner. Sign language interpretation and CART exist because automatic speech recognition is not accurate or immediate enough for legal proceedings, medical consent, education entitlements or emergencies. Where you are entitled to human provision, ask for it.
- Not a legal record. An automatic transcript is a helpful reference, not certified evidence. Anything that has to stand up formally needs a certified transcript.
- Not perfect. Accuracy falls with background noise, crosstalk, distance from the microphone, poor room acoustics and unfamiliar names. Live text is not available in every language yet. Live text is a draft to follow along with; check anything that matters against the transcript and the audio.
Getting a usable transcript in practice
Automatic speech recognition rewards a small amount of preparation, and most of it is about the microphone rather than the software.
- Put the microphone near the speech, not near you. A phone in the middle of a table beats a phone in your pocket by a wide margin, and a phone next to the person doing most of the talking beats both.
- Record the whole session in one go. Stopping and restarting fragments the transcript and makes speaker labels restart too.
- Name the speakers once. Long-press a speaker badge and choose Rename Speaker...; named voices are recognized automatically in later recordings, so a regular meeting gets easier over time. See teach ThinkScribe who is speaking.
- Add the vocabulary you keep seeing wrong. Course codes, drug names, colleagues' surnames, project names: add them to your custom dictionary once. See custom vocabulary.
- Read the clean version. Transcripts show cleaned text by default, with hesitations and fillers removed, which makes them shorter and easier to read. If you need the exact wording, ... > Show Original shows the raw text.
- Ask instead of reading everything. For a long session, the Summary tab gives a summary with an Action Items list, and you can tap a citation in the summary to jump to the line it came from. You can also ask a question in the recording's Chat tab; on a Mac, Chat answers show sources you can click to hear the moment. See chat with a recording and the summaries guide.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between live captions and a transcript?
Live captions appear while someone is speaking, so you can follow a conversation, lecture or talk as it happens; they are fast and imperfect and usually disappear afterwards. A transcript is produced from a recording and arrives after the fact, but it can be read at your own pace, searched, corrected, labeled with speaker names, summarized and exported as a document or a caption file. Many people use live captions in the moment and a transcript afterwards.
Does ThinkScribe show live captions while it records?
Yes, on iPhone, iPad and Mac. With Live Text on, which is the default, the words appear on screen as they are spoken while you record, and the full transcript with speakers is made after you tap Stop. Live text pauses while the app is in the background, and it covers what you are recording in ThinkScribe, not phone calls or audio in other apps.
Can I use a transcription app to caption a lecture?
You can record the lecture on your iPhone, follow along with live text during the session, and read the transcript afterwards, which works well for revision because the text is searchable and every line links back to the audio. It is automatic text, not a professional captioning service. If your school or university provides captioning, a note-taker or official recordings, use that provision first and treat a personal transcript as the fallback.
Is a transcription app a hearing aid?
No. It does not amplify or process sound for listening, it has no medical function, and it is not a medical device. It converts speech into text you can read. Hearing devices and audiological care are separate things provided by professionals.
How do I add captions to a video for deaf and hard of hearing viewers?
Transcribe the video, read the transcript through and correct any names, numbers or technical terms, then export SRT or VTT. Attach the SRT next to the video for a player or import it into your editor as a caption track, and use VTT for video on a web page. Publishing a text transcript alongside the video as well helps people who prefer to read the document.
