Live Captions

Live captions show you a rolling transcription while a recording is running — handy for checking that Wave is picking up the room, or for following along in a noisy space. It's an iPhone feature, and it's a preview only: your real transcript is produced after you finish.

Turn captions on

Captions stay on for the rest of that recording, and switch themselves back Off for the next one — it's a per-recording choice, not a setting.

What the status line means

• Off — captions aren't running.
• On — captions are enabled and starting up.
• Listening… — the recognizer is active and picking up audio.
• Unavailable — captions couldn't run. The panel below explains why.

Captions are not your transcript

The caption feed comes from your iPhone's built-in speech recognizer, not from Wave. It's rough by design: no speaker labels, no cleanup, and it isn't saved anywhere. It also isn't guaranteed to run offline — Apple's recognizer decides that, which is why one of the failure messages below is about the network. When you tap Finish, Wave uploads your audio and produces the real transcript and summary through its own pipeline — that's the version with speaker separation and accurate punctuation, and it's the one that ends up in your session.

Caption language

Captions follow the language you've set for the recording with the Language tool in the Session tools row, as long as your iPhone supports that language for speech recognition. Change the language mid-recording and captions switch with it. See language and translation for how the recording language affects transcripts and summaries.

When captions say "Unavailable"

Turning captions on can fail for a few reasons, and Wave shows the reason in the caption panel:

• "Enable Siri and Dictation to use live captions." — iOS speech recognition is switched off for your device. Turn Dictation on in your iPhone's keyboard settings.
• "Microphone and speech recognition permissions are required." — you declined the speech recognition prompt. Re-enable it for Wave in your iPhone's privacy settings.
• "Live captions are not available for this language." — your iPhone can't recognize the language this recording is set to.
• "Speech recognition needs a network connection right now." — the recognizer wants a connection at that moment.
• "Speech recognition is unavailable on this device." — the device doesn't support it.

In every one of these cases the recording itself is unaffected. Captions failing never affects your audio, transcript, or summary — turn the switch back Off and keep recording.

FAQ