Earshot

For iPhone

Every voice.
Every sound.

Real-time captions that are truly free, fully private, and run entirely on your iPhone. No accounts. No cloud. No tracking.

Download on the App Store Why I built it →
FREE· PRIVATE· OFFLINE· 99 LANGUAGES· ON-DEVICE
Earshot live captions on iPhone
99
languages
36
sounds recognized
0
bytes of audio uploaded
100%
on-device

The story

From a product manager behind Android’s Live Transcribe.

In 2019, a team at Google spent nine months building Android’s Live Transcribe — free, real-time captions for speech and ambient sound, inspired by a Deaf researcher who’d spent his career on captioning. It launched at Google I/O, became one of the most-adopted accessibility apps Google ever shipped, and came preloaded on billions of devices. I was one of two product managers on it.

Google never brought it to iOS, and nothing has truly filled the gap — the lookalikes charge, upsell, or send your audio to the cloud. Having a disability shouldn’t cost you money or your privacy.

So I rebuilt it for iPhone. Free. Private. Entirely on-device. That’s Earshot.

Free

No sign-up, no sign-in, no ads, no upsells. Free should mean free.

Private

Everything runs on your device. Your audio is never uploaded, logged, or stored.

Offline

Works with no Wi-Fi or cellular. The speech model lives on your phone.

99 languages

Understands all 99 of Whisper's languages, with two dozen hand-picked for one-tap selection — and translates any of them into English on the fly.

Sound-aware

Recognizes dozens of everyday sounds, with full-screen alerts for smoke alarms, doorbells, a crying baby, and more.

Built for accessibility

Designed with the deaf and hard-of-hearing community first: Dynamic Type, VoiceOver, high contrast.

Earshot live captions screen
Live captions, big and readable.
Earshot smoke-alarm alert
Full-screen alerts for urgent sounds.
Earshot sound catalog
Hundreds of recognizable sounds.

Your words never leave your phone.

No accounts. No analytics. No tracking. The only time Earshot touches the network is to download its on-device models — speech recognition and speaker separation — never to send your audio anywhere. After that, it works fully offline.

Read the full privacy policy →

Under the hood

Real speech recognition, running on your iPhone.

Earshot transcribes locally with OpenAI’s Whisper. Word Error Rate — the standard accuracy benchmark — is about 8.6% for the small English model. It also ships faster tiny and base models that fly on older iPhones, so you can trade a little accuracy for speed when you need to.

Earshot stands on open source. With deep thanks to OpenAI’s Whisper for the on-device speech model, Argmax’s WhisperKit for the open-source, iOS-optimized Core ML harness that runs it on iPhone, and pyannote for the speaker-separation models behind multi-party diarization.

What's New June 2, 2026

Earshot is live on the App Store

After 32 builds and a lot of generous help, Earshot — free, private, fully on-device live captions in 99 languages — is now available on the App Store.

See all updates →

Read along with the world.

Download on the App Store What's new →