SonicCaption is a Chrome/Edge extension that overlays ultra-low-latency live captions and instant translation on any video or meeting—YouTube, Zoom, Google Meet, courses, livestreams, and more. Show bilingual subtitles or translation-only, and customize styles to match how you learn and watch.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I’m Ethan, the maker of SonicCaption.
I built SonicCaption because I kept hitting the same friction while learning and working in non-native languages: captions were either unavailable, inaccurate, or locked to a single platform. I’d watch a course on one site, jump into a Zoom call, then a Google Meet — and every time I had to switch tools or give up entirely. The result was constant context switching and missed details.
My first attempts were messy: I tried saving transcripts to a web app, forcing people to “upload” audio, or relying on whatever captions the platform provided. None of that felt natural. What finally clicked was this: don’t move the user to a new workflow — bring captions to where the user already is. That’s why SonicCaption is a browser extension overlay that works across sites, not another video player.
Along the way I learned two things:
1) People don’t all read captions the same way — some want bilingual lines, some want translation-only, some need bigger fonts or different layouts. So customization became a core feature, not a nice-to-have.
2) Reliability matters. People need captions to keep working even when the audio is messy—accents, background noise, fast speakers, or switching languages—so I spent a lot of time improving stability and making it feel “hands-off” once you start.
If you try it, I’d genuinely love your feedback on:
- Which scenario matters most to you (courses, meetings, livestreams, etc.)?
- Do you prefer bilingual captions, or translation-only?
- What would make captions feel less distracting and more “native” to your workflow?
Thanks for checking it out — happy to answer anything about the build, tech choices, or roadmap 🙏
SonicMeet