How to Turn On Live Captions in Windows 11

Sometimes you need to understand spoken audio without turning up the volume. Maybe you are working in a noisy room, listening to a recording with unclear speech, or watching a video that does not provide captions.

Windows 11 includes a feature called Live Captions. It can generate captions for supported audio playing on your computer.

How to enable Live Captions

Press Windows + Ctrl + L. On a supported Windows 11 computer, this opens Live Captions.

You can also find the feature through Windows accessibility settings. The first time you use it, Windows may need to download the required speech-recognition files. Follow the on-screen instructions.

What can you use it for?

Live Captions can be useful for spoken content in videos, online meetings, and other supported audio. It is particularly helpful when the application itself does not provide captions. It can also improve accessibility for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Are the captions always accurate?

No. Automatic speech recognition can make mistakes. Background noise, overlapping speakers, unfamiliar names, accents, and poor recording quality may affect accuracy. Do not rely on automatically generated captions as an exact transcript when every word matters.

How to turn it off

Use the Live Captions interface to close the feature. You can turn it on again whenever you need it.

The bottom line

Live Captions is a useful Windows accessibility feature that can also help people who simply prefer reading along with audio. It is worth knowing about before paying for a separate captioning application.