Live Classroom Captions

Live captions with translation, plus draw and annotate on Docs, Slides, Word, PowerPoint, Canva, and any webpage. For teachers.

Live Classroom Captions turns your speech into live captions and translates them in real time, so every student can follow your lesson in a language they understand. What your students get: Choose the languages your class needs and translated captions appear on screen as you teach, so a student who reads Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Khmer, or one of 130+ other languages can follow along instead of falling behind. Your own teaching language counts as a language too, so you can run captions in English alone — what a Deaf or hard-of-hearing student needs — without translating anything. Turn on Room Sharing (a one-time setup) and students also see your captions on their own phones, tablets, or Chromebooks, each in the language they pick. You create a short class code once, post it in your LMS or show it as a QR code on the board, and each student enters it into the extension once and stays connected all year. Students never need an account. A student with several teachers keeps a saved class list and taps to switch between them. Captions appear on a student's device only after they tap Start for your class, and stop when you stop presenting. Students can also send you a question right from their caption view, without raising a hand. What you do as the teacher: Start captions from the toolbar and a caption overlay appears on whatever tab you're presenting, whether that's a document, a slideshow, a PDF, a video, or a simulation. Your words appear in your language as you speak, with each translation beside them in its own color-coded box. Drag the boxes, resize them, and style them so they sit where they won't cover your content. The captions keep running as you move between tabs. Student questions collect in a movable panel on your screen, so you can answer them when it fits your lesson. A co-teacher or aide with their own subscription can caption into your room with your approval, and each line carries the speaker's name. Running an all-day event? Conference mode keeps the room open for 24 hours. Draw and annotate on anything: Mark up your lesson right on top of the pages you already teach from — online documents, slide decks, PDFs, or any webpage. Ink anchors to the content, so your notes stay put while you scroll a document or move through slides. Pen, highlighter, and a precise eraser. On a touch screen, wipe with your palm like a real whiteboard. Sketch a rough line, circle, square, or triangle and it snaps into a clean shape. Triangles come out as the kind you drew: right, isosceles, or equilateral. Insert shapes, a Cartesian graph with adjustable increments, a ruler, and a protractor. Resize, recolor, fill, group, lock, and layer them. Arrows have a handle at each end: drag either one to swing the arrow around and stretch it in a single motion, and put a head on one end or both — the second head gives you an equilibrium arrow. Whiteboard mode gives you a blank surface to write on, with your caption boxes still visible on top. Presenting a slideshow in fullscreen? Keep drawing. Change slides with your keyboard, a presenter remote, or the pen toolbar's own arrows without leaving Draw mode — and each slide keeps its own ink. Classroom widgets on the same toolbar: Every widget floats over your lesson, drags anywhere, resizes from its corners, and takes the color you tap on the toolbar. Clock, timer, and a countdown to any date and time, with a save-the-last-minutes helper for wrapping up a class. Live polls: up to 10 questions at a time — multiple choice, true/false, or a smiley scale. Students answer on our poll page with a short code; the charts grow on your board as answers come in. Only counts are ever recorded, never which device chose what. Scoreboard: home/away, team points for up to 8 teams, or a race where a car drives toward the finish line as each team scores. Embed a website: drop a live webpage — a graphing calculator, a video, a shared document — into a window on your board. Student spinner: upload your class roster once (any CSV export works — you tell it which columns are the name and the period) and spin the wheel to call on someone. Pick a period, filter to names that start with or contain a letter, and skip students who were just called until everyone has had a turn. Team sorter: deal the same roster into random groups — a number of groups or groups of a size — sorted A–Z, Z–A, or shuffled inside each group, and export the groups as a CSV. Work symbols for the board: No Talking, Quiet Talk, Partner Work, Group Work. Your roster stays on your own device. It is never uploaded to us. More for real classrooms: Student response mode: tap the people icon and the mic listens in a student's language, then translates their answer back to English so the whole class can follow. Custom vocabulary: add the terms your subject uses so they translate correctly every time. Some subject-specific vocabulary packs are already offered for free. More can be added upon request. Two recognition engines: Basic Mode uses the browser's free built-in speech recognition, with no coins or limits. AI Mode is more accurate with technical terms and detects languages automatically; it runs on prepaid AI Coins that never expire. No AI account or API key is ever needed. Transcripts: Every session saves automatically as a transcript you can edit. Connect your Google Drive and each session also saves there as a formatted document, one click to authorize, no setup required. The extension can only see the files it creates; it never touches the rest of your Drive. Privacy: This extension never records or stores your audio. In Basic Mode, the browser's own speech recognition handles the audio directly, the same as any voice typing in your browser, and only the resulting text reaches the extension. In AI Mode, audio streams to the AI transcription provider through a short-lived secure session and is not stored by us. Captions shared to student devices are deleted within 24 hours. Students are anonymous: no student names or IDs are ever collected, and your class roster for the spinner and team sorter stays on your own device. See the privacy policy for details. Plans: Every feature is unlocked for 10 days, no credit card required. After that, plans start at $6/month (or $64.80/year): Classroom, with 2 translation languages and up to 35 student devices per class; Classroom Plus at $9/month, with 5 languages and 60 devices; and Campus at $14/month, with 12 languages and 90 devices. Every plan includes live captions, class codes, Q&A, annotation, all the widgets, transcripts, and vocabulary. Most captions translate through the included engine; each plan also includes a monthly allowance of premium translation characters for when the included engine is busy, and the extension shows you at a glance how much is left. Students always join free. No ads, ever. See classroomcaptions.com for plans and the user manual.