Real-time AI subtitles delivered directly inside the Twitch player. Viewer-controlled, accessibility-first, and free for your audience the moment you go live.
Enable Captions on Your ChannelMost caption solutions for streamers add a text overlay inside OBS — visible on the stream itself, burned into the video, impossible to turn off. Viewers who don't need captions see them regardless. Viewers who do need them get whatever size and position the streamer chose, with no way to adjust.
StreamTranslate's Twitch extension solves this the right way. Captions appear as a native overlay within the Twitch player interface — the same layer where Twitch displays its own UI elements. Each viewer can toggle captions on or off independently. The stream video itself remains clean. The streamer's broadcast is unchanged.
This is what accessibility looks like when it's built correctly: the tool adapts to the viewer, not the other way around.
Approximately 15% of adults experience some degree of hearing loss. For Deaf viewers and those who are hard of hearing, live captions are not a convenience — they are the difference between being able to watch a stream and being locked out of it entirely. StreamTranslate's extension makes any captioned stream accessible the moment it goes live, without requiring the streamer to produce a separate accessible version or delay to VOD.
Captions are generated in real time using Deepgram Nova-2, one of the most accurate speech-to-text models available for streaming audio. The sub-500ms latency means captions stay in sync with what is happening on screen, not lagging several seconds behind the action.
Many CODA viewers watch streams alongside Deaf family members or in environments where audio is not practical. The ability to toggle captions within the native Twitch player — without disrupting the stream for others in the room — makes co-viewing accessible in a way that burned-in OBS captions simply cannot achieve. One viewer enables captions. Another watching the same stream does not. Same broadcast, no compromise for either person.
English is the dominant language on Twitch, but Twitch's audience is global. For viewers who speak English as a second language, captions dramatically improve comprehension — especially during fast-paced commentary, gaming jargon, or rapid-fire conversation between multiple speakers. StreamTranslate goes further than transcription: viewers can select a translation language and receive captions in their native language in real time. A Japanese viewer watching an English-language stream sees captions in Japanese. A Portuguese speaker gets Portuguese. No delay, no separate translated stream, no extra setup on the streamer's end. See all supported translation languages.
StreamTranslate's architecture is designed to add zero latency to your stream and zero complexity to your OBS setup. Here is exactly what happens when a viewer enables captions:
Your microphone audio is captured by an OBS Browser Source running in your scene. This source sends the audio stream to StreamTranslate's transcription pipeline, powered by Deepgram Nova-2. The transcribed text is broadcast in real time to the StreamTranslate extension running inside each viewer's Twitch player.
The extension renders captions as an overlay on the video element — not a separate chat ticker, not a pop-out window, but a proper subtitle layer synchronized to the stream. Viewers who have the extension installed and captions toggled on see them. Everyone else sees a clean stream. The streamer's OBS output, encoding settings, and stream bitrate are completely unaffected.
For streamers who also want captions visible on their own OBS scene — for recording, for clips, or for viewers on platforms without the extension — StreamTranslate's OBS overlay continues to work in parallel. Both systems run simultaneously from the same transcription feed with no additional configuration required.
Sign up at streamtranslate.live/setup. Streamer access is $9.99/month and covers the Twitch extension, the OBS overlay, and all 50+ translation languages. Your viewers pay nothing to use captions.
From your StreamTranslate dashboard, authorize your Twitch account. This links the transcription feed to your specific channel so the extension knows where to deliver captions for your viewers.
Copy your unique Browser Source URL from the dashboard and add it to OBS as a browser source in your scene. No software to install, no plugin to manage — just a URL. This is how StreamTranslate captures your microphone audio for transcription without touching your video pipeline.
Find StreamTranslate in the Twitch Extension Store and install it. Activate it as a component or overlay extension on your channel from the Twitch Extensions dashboard. The extension links automatically to your StreamTranslate account via your connected Twitch login.
Start your stream as normal. The moment you go live and audio is being captured, captions begin generating. Viewers with the extension installed will see a caption toggle appear in the player. No action is required on your end mid-stream.
Streamers have used OBS text overlays and browser source captions for years. They work — but they come with real tradeoffs that a native Twitch extension eliminates.
Captions are rendered into the video feed itself. Every viewer sees them whether they want to or not. The streamer controls font, size, and position — viewers cannot adjust anything. If the caption box covers a game element or UI, it covers it for everyone. VODs and clips always include the captions, even when the viewer watching the VOD has no need for them. There is also no translation layer: every viewer sees the same language the streamer speaks, with no per-viewer language selection possible.
Captions are rendered by each viewer's browser, inside the Twitch player UI layer. Viewers toggle them on or off. Viewers with the extension installed can select their preferred translation language and receive captions in that language with no extra effort from the streamer. The video feed stays clean — clipping tools, VODs, and highlight reels do not have burned-in text. Streamers can still run the OBS overlay in parallel for viewers who do not have the extension installed. Both modes draw from the same real-time transcription feed simultaneously.
For streamers who care about accessibility — and for platforms, sponsors, and brands that increasingly require it — native player captions are the professional standard. StreamTranslate makes that standard available to independent streamers at $9.99/month.
StreamTranslate's OBS Browser Source overlay works across every major streaming platform: Twitch, YouTube Live, Kick, Facebook Gaming, and Rumble. The Twitch extension specifically delivers the native in-player experience for Twitch viewers. For all other platforms, the OBS overlay approach places captions within your stream scene — visible to all viewers regardless of platform, with translation support still active.
Streamers who multistream across Twitch and YouTube simultaneously can run the extension for Twitch viewers while the OBS overlay covers YouTube. The live translator handles all platforms from a single dashboard with no additional configuration needed per destination.
The streaming industry has been slow to treat accessibility as core infrastructure. Twitch added auto-captions in 2023, but coverage is inconsistent across regions and translation is absent. YouTube's auto-captions are strong for VODs but lag significantly on live streams. Independent platforms like Kick and Rumble offer nothing at all by default.
Streamers who provide reliable, accurate captions reach a larger audience — and retain viewers who would otherwise leave within the first few minutes of struggling to follow along. For communities like Deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers, CODA families, and the global ESL audience that represents a massive share of Twitch viewership outside North America and Western Europe, captions are not an enhancement. They are the baseline for inclusion.
StreamTranslate makes it practical for any streamer, at any audience size, to meet that baseline. The setup takes under ten minutes. The extension is live in the Twitch Extension Store today. Once it is active, every viewer who needs captions can enable them without asking the streamer to change anything about how they broadcast.
StreamTranslate uses Deepgram's Nova-2 model, one of the most capable real-time speech-to-text engines currently available for live audio. Accuracy typically exceeds 95% for clear English speech under reasonable acoustic conditions. The biggest factors affecting accuracy are microphone quality, background noise bleed from game audio, and how clearly the speaker enunciates. A dedicated streaming microphone — XLR or USB condenser — with game audio routed to a separate channel in OBS will produce noticeably better captions than a headset mic competing with loud in-game sound. Nova-2 also supports a growing list of primary spoken languages beyond English with strong accuracy scores.
StreamTranslate supports real-time transcription in the streamer's primary spoken language, and real-time translation output in 50+ languages for viewers. Supported translation languages include Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Arabic, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Hindi, and many more. Viewers select their preferred language from within the Twitch extension interface. The streamer does not need to configure anything per-language — the translation engine handles all output languages simultaneously from the single transcription feed.
No. The OBS Browser Source captures audio and sends it to StreamTranslate's servers for transcription. This is a one-way audio send and does not interact with your video encoding pipeline in any way. Your OBS output bitrate, frame rate, and encoding settings are completely unaffected. On the viewer side, the Twitch extension renders captions in the browser — a lightweight text operation with no impact on video buffering or playback quality. Captions arrive at viewers with under 500ms of latency from the moment the words are spoken, keeping them meaningfully synchronized with the action on screen.
Twitch's native auto-captions, powered by Amazon Transcribe, have several real limitations: they are not available in all regions, are English-only for most users, and offer no translation capability. They also cannot be enabled or controlled by the streamer — it is purely a viewer-side Twitch account setting, meaning many viewers do not know it exists. StreamTranslate's extension works on any channel where the streamer has an active account, regardless of region. It supports real-time translation into 50+ languages. The streamer controls activation and display settings from the dashboard. And StreamTranslate's transcription latency is meaningfully lower than Twitch's built-in solution in most tested conditions.
Yes. From the StreamTranslate dashboard, streamers can configure default font size, caption position within the player, and caption text color. These settings apply as the default state when viewers enable the extension on a channel. Individual viewers can also adjust sizing to their preference, and toggle captions on or off independently — captions are never forced on by default. Viewer preferences are stored in the extension and persist between stream sessions, so a viewer who enables captions once will have them ready the next time they watch. Streamers do not need to update OBS or interrupt a live stream to change caption display settings — dashboard changes apply to the live extension feed in real time.