LiveBridge — Subtitle Translator

LiveBridge puts a translated caption over whatever a supported Android app is playing. Say you're watching a Korean cooking channel or a Spanish news stream in a player that offers no captions in your language. LiveBridge captures that app's audio, recognizes the speech on your phone and shows the translation in a small floating window. You can also show the original line under it, which helps if you're learning the language.

The caption window can be moved, locked in place and restyled for text size, color, opacity and window size. The app keeps the last 20 captions for review and lets you change how long it waits for the end of a sentence before translating. A newer screen tool works on on-screen text instead of speech. You draw a box over part of the screen, the phone reads the text, and LiveBridge translates it. For Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean it can also show readings such as pinyin, IPA or romanization, and the store listing warns that these may be wrong or missing.

Setup takes a few steps. You review the consent screens, sign in with Google, pick languages and download the speech models. Android then asks for the overlay permission, the audio permission used for playback capture, and screen sharing. A short English sample lets you test captioning before you try your own video.

The biggest limit comes from Android. The app you're watching has to allow playback capture, and protected content can't be captured. Translation needs an internet connection, singing isn't separated from speech, and accuracy and delay depend on the audio, the device and the network. Closing the LiveBridge app alone doesn't stop capture. You end it with Stop all or by closing every caption and tool window.

Speech recognition runs on the phone. With your consent, the recognized text and your language choices go over HTTPS to the developer's own server, which translates them with the Hy-MT2 model. The privacy policy says audio and screen images aren't uploaded, that translation requests are handled in memory and not logged unless you opt in to caption recording, and that the text isn't sent to outside AI APIs. That opt-in, called improvement sharing, is off by default and open only to users 18 and over. If you turn it on, caption text and translations are kept on the operator's PC for up to 7 days or 20,000 records. The screen tool uses Google ML Kit, which sends Google technical usage data but not the images or the text. The app is for ages 14 and up.

Each Google account gets 24 hours of ad-free use once, starting at first sign-in. After that, free use runs on rewarded ads, each adding 20 minutes of caption time, with banner and interstitial ads as well. Monthly and yearly subscriptions remove ads and time limits. The yearly plan has a 7-day trial that becomes a paid plan unless you cancel before it ends. The store page doesn't list prices, so check them in Google Play before subscribing. As of November 6, 2026, the app showed 50+ downloads on Google Play.