A beginner's guide to the most common live stream caption method in 2026. What OBS Browser Source is, how it powers captions, and why it's become the industry standard.
Set Up Your CaptionsOBS Studio (Open Broadcaster Software) is the free, open-source software that most streamers use to capture game footage, webcam video, and audio, combining them into a video stream sent to Twitch, YouTube, Kick, or wherever they broadcast. It's the industry standard for streaming production — used by millions of creators worldwide. Every professional streamer overlay you've seen (alerts, donation trackers, webcam borders) is almost certainly done in OBS.
OBS has a feature called "Browser Source" — a source type you can add to any scene. A Browser Source takes a URL (a web address) and renders that webpage as a visual element in your OBS scene. The webpage displays in a Chromium-based embedded browser within OBS, and the visual output appears as a layer in your stream video. Browser Sources are used for stream alerts (Streamlabs/StreamElements widgets), donation goals, chat overlays, and live captions.
StreamTranslate gives you a unique URL — your personal caption overlay URL. When loaded in a browser, this URL connects to StreamTranslate's servers, receives your live audio via microphone, processes it through Deepgram Nova-2 speech-to-text, and displays the resulting caption text in real time on the webpage. When you add this URL as an OBS Browser Source, OBS renders that webpage as a transparent layer in your stream scene. Caption text appears on screen and updates in real time as you speak. Every viewer sees it — no viewer-side setup required.
Browser Sources render with transparent backgrounds by default — only the content (caption text) is visible over your stream. The technology is cross-platform (Windows and Mac), handles Unicode natively (Japanese, Arabic, Korean characters render correctly), and updates in real time via WebSocket connections (the mechanism StreamTranslate uses to push new caption text to the browser). This makes it both flexible and technically robust for live captioning.
Sign up at streamtranslate.live/setup and start your free trial. You'll receive a unique URL that is your caption overlay source.
Open OBS Studio. In the Scenes panel, select the scene you want to add captions to — typically your main streaming scene.
In the Sources panel, click the + button. Select "Browser" from the dropdown. Name it "StreamTranslate Captions" and click OK.
In settings: paste your StreamTranslate URL in the URL field. Set Width to 1920 and Height to 1080 (or your stream resolution). Click OK.
Drag the Browser Source to the bottom of your OBS preview. The caption text will appear at the bottom of your stream frame, visible to all viewers automatically.
OBS Browser Source is the dominant method for stream captions because it's flexible, platform-agnostic, and doesn't require OBS plugins that might break with OBS updates. Plugin-based caption solutions (LocalVocal, obs-captions-plugin) are integrated more tightly into OBS but have maintenance dependencies. Browser Source-based solutions like StreamTranslate are updated server-side — when StreamTranslate improves, your captions automatically improve without any update on your end.
A feature in OBS Studio that renders a webpage as a visual layer in your stream. Used for alerts, overlays, and live captions. Any website can be displayed as a transparent overlay in your stream video.
StreamTranslate gives you a unique URL that, added as a Browser Source in OBS, renders your live caption text in real time. You speak; captions appear in the browser source; they're visible in your stream to all viewers automatically.
Yes. StreamTranslate's primary integration is via OBS Browser Source. OBS Studio is free to download from obsproject.com and works on Windows and Mac.
Yes. Browser Source content is part of your OBS video output. It appears in your stream video for every viewer on every platform and device — no viewer action required.
Browser Source-based services update server-side without requiring you to update OBS plugins. More resilient to OBS version changes and works across all platforms and streaming destinations.
Yes. The Browser Source is freely positioned in OBS — drag it to any position in your scene and resize it to fit your layout.