Live subtitles · over any app
Hono Subtitles listens to the audio playing in any app on your iPhone, translates it as it is spoken, and floats the subtitles on top of your screen — so you keep watching, in a language you actually read.
Works over anything that plays sound
The gap
Subtitles exist for what is popular and on demand. Everything else — the live, the raw, the audio-only — you are on your own. That is the whole reason this app exists.
A live stream happens as it happens. No fansub group can prepare a translation in advance, and by the time one is posted, the moment is gone. Idol streams, sports commentary, keynotes, live shopping — none of it can ever be pre-subtitled.
Japanese, Korean and Chinese drama and anime straight from the source, imported films, foreign-language YouTube. Often audio-only, and when subtitles do exist they are in a language you do not read.
Podcasts, audiobooks, interviews, lectures, online meetings and briefings. There is no video to subtitle — but there is audio, and audio is all it ever needed.
How it works
No setup, no accounts, no subtitle files to hunt down. Here is the whole flow, with nothing cut out.
The left menu is what is being spoken, the right menu is what you want to read. If a language pack still needs downloading, the app tells you before you start rather than leaving you with a silent window.
iOS asks you to confirm — tap Start Sharing in the system sheet. That sheet is not a warning: it is the only way any iPhone app can receive another app's audio, and it is the single permission this app needs.
The subtitle window floats up on its own and keeps pace with the dialogue. Drag it, resize it, switch apps — it stays on top and keeps updating. You never leave the app you were watching.
Display modes
Over any app
There is no list of supported apps, because there is nothing to support one app at a time. Whatever is playing on the phone — a streaming app, a browser tab, a podcast, a lecture recording — the subtitles land on top of it.
Security & privacy
Both halves of the pipeline — speech recognition and translation — run locally on your iPhone using Apple's on-device frameworks. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing is kept.
No audio or video is captured, written to disk, stored or exported. The app has no library and no history.
No sign-in, no email, no profile. Nothing reports back what you watched or which languages you picked.
Language models download once, then everything works with no connection at all — on a plane, in a tunnel, anywhere.
iOS has no API that simply hands one app another app's audio; screen sharing is the only route there is. The app reads that stream, renders subtitles, and discards it — nothing is recorded and nothing goes anywhere.
FAQ
An iPhone on iOS 26 or later. The first time you use a language, the app downloads that language's recognition and translation models. After that it works fully offline.
Because iOS has no API that simply hands one app another app's audio. The screen-sharing mechanism is the only route that exists, so the system sheet appears and you tap Start Sharing. Hono Subtitles uses the audio stream only — nothing is recorded, stored or exported. It is also the only permission the app asks for.
Yes, once a language pair has been downloaded. Recognition and translation both run on the device, so no connection is needed while you watch.
The list is read from iOS at runtime rather than hardcoded, so it tracks what your particular iPhone can do. On the listening side it is the overlap between Apple's on-device speech models and its translation models — English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese in both scripts, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Hindi. On the reading side, any language Apple's translator handles. Models download the first time you pick a language, so a fresh phone shows fewer until it has fetched them.
No. iOS allows only one Picture in Picture window at a time, so if another app opens its own, yours is taken over. The audio share keeps running and the app's button becomes Open Subtitle Window. One tap brings it back.
Look at the status line above the big button on the main screen — it names whichever stage is pending, whether that is a model downloading, a language pack not yet installed, or audio not being shared. No line there means there is nothing for you to do. Also make sure the video is not muted, and check for the red recording indicator in the status bar, which means audio really is being shared. Recognition works from sound, so heavy background music or several people talking at once will noticeably reduce accuracy.
Free to download, and free to try: a new install gets three captioning sessions, and one more every week after those run out. A session only counts once subtitles actually appear, and it is never cut short — watch for hours and it is still one session. To lift the limit there is a monthly subscription, a yearly one, or a one-time lifetime unlock; current prices are shown in the App Store in your own currency.
Free to start. Works right away. No account, no upload, nothing to set up.
Download on theApp Store