Live captions and notes

Sublayer

Live captions and notes

Sublayer is a Mac caption and transcript workspace for meetings, lessons, interviews, calls, and everyday note capture. Start a session, watch speech become readable text, review what mattered, and export useful transcript artifacts when you are done.

iPhone & iPadNo accountNo ads or trackingPrivate by design

Features

What it does

Floating always-on-top subtitle overlay
Full caption mode or compact HUD mode
On-device speech recognition through Apple's Speech framework
10 language options for local captioning
Caption profiles for standard, presentation, accessibility, and streaming-style layouts
Font size, text color, background opacity, and overlay position controls
Custom dictionary for names, terms, and jargon
Keyword Spotlight to highlight important terms live and count them in saved sessions
Searchable local Session History
Timestamped transcript segments
Find-in-transcript highlighting
Session Brief with takeaways, actions, decisions, questions, dates, topics, and Markdown export

The live overlay floats above your work so captions stay visible while you present, teach, study, review recordings, or follow a conversation. Sublayer uses Apple's Speech framework with on-device recognition and keeps your workflow local to the Mac.

Version 2.1 adds Session Brief, a local review panel that turns a saved transcript into a practical handoff report. It extracts key takeaways, likely action items, decisions, questions, dates and times, key topics, watchword hits, and review prompts. Copy the brief or save it as Markdown beside your transcript.

PRO CAPTION WORKFLOW

SESSION REVIEW

Privacy

Private by design

Sublayer does not require an account and does not include third-party advertising or analytics SDKs. Content you create stays in the app on your device unless you explicitly export or share it. See the privacy policy.