Make every sermon, service, and prayer accessible. Real-time captions for church live streams on YouTube, Facebook, and any platform — up and running in 5 minutes.
Start Free TrialChurch live streaming has become one of the fastest-growing segments of online video. Tens of millions of people watch church services online every week — a trend that accelerated dramatically during 2020 and has never reversed. But nearly every church stream goes out without captions, excluding two of the most important groups in any congregation: the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and elderly members with age-related hearing loss.
Hearing loss is the third most common chronic health condition in the United States. Adults over 65 experience presbycusis (age-related hearing decline) at a rate of about 1 in 3 — and 1 in 2 for adults over 75. These are exactly the demographics that churches serve most. Watching a sermon on a laptop or TV without captions, especially with poor room acoustics or a preacher who moves around the pulpit, is genuinely inaccessible for millions of older viewers.
The deaf community has also historically been underserved by churches. While in-person ASL interpretation is now common in many congregations, online streams rarely carry ASL interpretation OR captions. Adding real-time text captions to your live stream is the most accessible step your church can take today.
Most churches already stream using a laptop or desktop computer running OBS Studio, connected to a camera and audio feed. StreamTranslate plugs directly into this workflow. You add a single Browser Source URL to your OBS scene, and captions appear automatically as the pastor or speaker talks.
The key requirement is a decent microphone or audio feed going into OBS. If your church uses a digital mixing board, running an XLR or digital audio output into your streaming computer gives StreamTranslate the cleanest possible audio — resulting in 95%+ caption accuracy. Lapel mics and headset mics work excellently. Room mics picking up reverberant sanctuary acoustics are more challenging but still functional.
Go to streamtranslate.live/setup and start your free trial. Takes 60 seconds.
StreamTranslate gives you a unique browser source URL. This is what you'll add to OBS.
In OBS, click + → Browser Source, paste the URL, set it to your stream resolution. Position the caption box at the bottom of your church stream video.
Start your service. StreamTranslate processes audio in real time and displays captions with under 500ms delay. Every viewer sees them — no app download required.
Speech recognition is optimized for spoken word, not singing. Captions during music segments will be imperfect — this is normal across all STT systems. Many churches mute the caption source during music portions and enable it for spoken segments (sermon, announcements, prayer). StreamTranslate supports easy toggling.
Many urban churches have congregations that speak multiple languages. StreamTranslate can translate your pastor's English sermon into Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Mandarin, French, or any of 50+ supported languages — in real time, simultaneously. Members of your congregation who struggle with English can follow the service via translated captions on the stream.
This is particularly powerful for immigrant congregations or multilingual churches that currently can't afford professional simultaneous translation services. At $9.99/month, it's a dramatic cost reduction compared to any human translation alternative.
StreamTranslate works wherever you stream. Most churches use YouTube Live (excellent long-form support, automatic archive), Facebook Live (built-in community features, easy sharing), or Vimeo Live. StreamTranslate's OBS browser source works identically on all of them. Your captions appear as part of the stream video itself, visible on every device your congregation uses — TV apps, phones, laptops, tablets.
If your church hasn't already invested in proper pulpit microphones, this is worth doing regardless of captions — it dramatically improves stream audio quality for everyone. A reliable lapel mic or headset for the preacher, a dedicated USB audio interface, and routing the audio directly into OBS will give StreamTranslate the clean audio feed it needs for highest accuracy. Avoid using the camera's built-in mic for speech-to-text as room reverb severely degrades STT accuracy.
Human CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) stenographers charge $75–$200 per hour for live captioning. For a 90-minute Sunday service plus Wednesday prayer meeting, that's potentially $200–$600 per week — over $10,000 per year. StreamTranslate is $9.99 per month for always-on, automatic captions. The quality gap is real for highly technical content (court proceedings, medical conferences), but for sermon delivery and church services, AI captions at 90-95% accuracy serve the congregation extremely well at a price point every church can afford.
Yes. StreamTranslate works on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitch, Kick, and any platform you stream to via OBS. The setup is identical regardless of which platform your church uses.
STT caption accuracy is much lower for singing than spoken word. Most churches use StreamTranslate for spoken segments (sermon, announcements, prayer) and toggle it during music. The interface makes this easy to manage.
With a decent lapel or headset microphone feeding clean audio into OBS, StreamTranslate achieves 92-96% accuracy for clear spoken English. This is powered by Deepgram Nova-2, one of the most accurate STT engines available.
Yes. StreamTranslate supports 50+ languages. Your pastor speaks English and viewers can see the captions translated into Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin, French, or any supported language in real time.
StreamTranslate costs $9.99/month after a free trial. Compare this to CART captioning at $75-200/hour — StreamTranslate is accessible for churches of any size and budget.
You need a computer running OBS Studio (free), a decent microphone or audio feed from your mixing board, and StreamTranslate. Most churches already have the equipment — StreamTranslate just adds the caption layer.