If you're seeing "Speech recognition service is currently unavailable in Google Chrome. Try using Microsoft Edge instead" — you're not alone. Here's the technical reason it's happening, why Edge isn't a real fix, and what to use instead.
Speech recognition service is currently unavailable in Google Chrome. Try using Microsoft Edge instead. Or a popup warning that "the service will fail completely if more than one transcription session is currently active on your computer." These errors are increasing as Google deprecates the Web Speech API.card required for the Free Plan; no payment unless you upgrade. Free Plan with 3 hours every month. Works on any browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge.
Caption.Ninja is a free, open-source captioning tool built on top of Chrome's built-in Web Speech API. For years, Chrome provided server-side speech recognition for free through this API — Caption.Ninja just hooked into it.
That's changing. Google is migrating Chrome's speech recognition from the legacy server-side service to on-device SODA (Speech On-Device API) models. During the migration, the old service is being throttled or made unavailable, and the new on-device service isn't shipping reliably to all users. Multiple Chromium bug reports (issue 40286514, 40948113) document the breakage. Brave Browser has filed a similar issue — on-device SpeechRecognition silently hangs in "downloading" state with no SODA component ever installing.
Caption.Ninja's own documentation now recommends switching to Microsoft Edge as a workaround. But Edge has its own broken SpeechRecognition API after version 111 (reported on Microsoft Q&A). The architecture is the problem — relying on a browser's free speech recognition for a streaming tool means you depend on what browser vendors decide to ship.
Edge is Chromium-based — it inherits all of Chrome's speech recognition issues. The bug reports above affect Edge too. And Edge has its own additional bugs (the SpeechRecognition API breakage after version 111). Caption.Ninja's "use Edge" suggestion buys you maybe a week before the same issues hit there too.
Firefox and Safari don't support free speech recognition at all — so they're not options either.
The actual fix isn't a different browser — it's a different architecture. Tools that rely on browser-native speech recognition will keep breaking because they depend on free APIs that Google is no longer prioritizing.
StreamTranslate uses advanced AI for speech recognition. That runs on dedicated servers (not in the browser) with a 99.9% uptime SLA. Audio streams from your mic to the cloud, transcription comes back. The browser doesn't matter — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge all work the same.
This costs more per minute than free Web Speech API ($0.0043/minute vs free), but it doesn't break. We charge for it because we pay for it.
| Aspect | StreamTranslate | Caption.Ninja |
|---|---|---|
| Currently working in Chrome? | ✅ Yes (advanced AI is independent) | ⚠ Failing (Web Speech API being deprecated) |
| Works in Safari? | ✅ Yes | ❌ No (Safari has no Web Speech API) |
| Works in Firefox? | ✅ Yes | ❌ No (Firefox has no free Web Speech) |
| Free option | Free Plan with 3 hours every month, card required for the Free Plan; no payment unless you upgrade | Free forever (when working) |
| Languages out of the box | 65 (incl. Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi) | 17 European via Bergamot · BYOK for others |
| Setup | One URL paste in OBS | Configure URL parameters, optional API key |
| Cost (casual streamer) | From $9.99 one-time | Free |
| Cost (asian languages) | Included in any plan | BYOK Google Cloud (~$20/1M chars) |
| Speaker diarization | 🔜 Coming soon | ❌ Single mic only |
| Dual-language display | ✅ Pro+ | ❌ Single only |
| Real-time word-by-word | ✅ Yes | ❌ Sentence-by-sentence |
| Hallucination filtering | ✅ Yes | Less needed (Bergamot is small MT) |
| Privacy | Audio sent to the cloud | Audio stays on your machine |
| Open source | No | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
Caption.Ninja wins on cost and privacy. We win on reliability, browser support, language coverage (Japanese/Korean/Mandarin/Hindi/Arabic), and managed setup. Different tools for different streamers.
If you're hitting the Chrome speech recognition error right now and need something that works for your stream tonight: launch StreamTranslate — 3 free hours every month, card required for the Free Plan; no payment unless you upgrade. Setup is one URL pasted into OBS as a Browser Source. Same workflow as Caption.Ninja, different speech recognition backend.
If Caption.Ninja is down for you right now, paste this in OBS and you're live in 60 seconds with translated captions.
Launch StreamTranslate →Also supports IRL with Moblin and the OBS audio plugin, including home and cloud OBS setups such as IRL Toolkit.
Use an OBS receiver for IRL Pro, Larix Broadcaster, PRISM Live Mobile or TVU Go. Cloud providers may need to install the plugin on your server.
Moblin · Moblin Browser Source · Cloud OBS · IRL Toolkit · OBS Studio · IRL Pro · Larix Broadcaster · PRISM Live Mobile · TVU Go · MediaMTX