The fastest captions,
keeping you in the conversation.
Cadence Captions is live captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, built so the words land while they still matter. Everything runs on your iPhone, which is what makes it quick, and why your audio and captions never touch a network.
A recording of Cadence Captions captioning a conversation:
- Speaker A: Here, sit. I saved you the seat by the window.
- Speaker B: Is that Mia’s drawing on the fridge?
- Speaker A: She put it up this morning. That’s supposed to be you.
- Speaker B: I have more hair in it than I do in person.
- Speaker A: She’s generous like that.
- Speaker B: Pass me the salad and I’ll forgive her.
- Speaker A: She wants to play her piece for you after.
- Speaker B: Then I’m not going anywhere.
Features
Built for the room you’re actually in.
A caption app is only as good as the awkward moments it handles: the person across the table, the noisy café, the sentence you need to read twice. These are the things Cadence Captions does about them.
Captions the moment you open it
After a one-time permission prompt, the capture screen starts listening on its own every time you open it, with no configuration to get through first. Pause, resume, and finish are one tap each, and a status dot always tells you whether it's actually listening.
Captions that follow you into other apps
Switch to another app and captioning keeps going, with the latest line floating in a small window you can move anywhere on screen. Read along while you text, look something up, or take notes, and tap the window to jump back. On by default; turn it off if you'd rather switching apps pause. Audio still never leaves the phone.
Flip the screen for the person across from you
One tap turns the captions 180°, so someone sitting opposite can read along without leaning over the table. It unflips itself when you stop.
Speaker labels
See who said what, marked as Speaker A, B, C with a coloured gutter bar that stays put for the whole conversation. Labels are anonymous and reset every session; no voiceprint is kept, so the app never learns who anyone is.
Text as large as you need it
A caption size slider scales text up to more than twice the standard size, on top of whatever Dynamic Type setting you already use, with a live sample so you can see the result while you drag.
A caption font that reads the way you read
Choose the typeface captions are drawn in: the standard system font, Atkinson Hyperlegible for extra clarity, Literata if serifs are easier for you to follow, or OpenDyslexic. A live sample updates as you pick, and it applies to the transcription itself.
Scroll back without losing the thread
Scroll up to re-read something and new captions stop yanking you back down. A “jump to latest” pill brings you back the moment you want it.
Every session saved on the phone
Conversations are kept on the phone, newest first, with the date, length, and a preview of the opening line. Tap to read the whole thing back; swipe to delete it for good.
Share a transcript as plain text
Send any saved conversation out through the normal share sheet as text, with speaker names attached when labels were on. Useful for notes after an appointment.
Tune the mic to the room
Tell it whether you're talking with a group or one person, and how readily to treat quiet or distant sound as speech worth captioning. A noisy café and a one-on-one across a desk are not the same problem.
Control how fast lines lock in
Choose how long a pause has to be before a caption is finalised: snappier for quick back-and-forth, more relaxed for speakers who trail off mid-sentence.
Light or dark, whenever you need it
Pick whichever is easier on your eyes, independent of the system setting, for rooms where the phone is the brightest thing on the table.
Names spelled the way you spell them
On Turbo, optionally let Cadence Captions capitalise your contacts' first names correctly, so it writes “Sarah” and not “sarah”. The other engines punctuate natively and already handle this. Off by default, and those names never leave the device.
It tells you when something's wrong
If the captions stall, you get a loud banner and a retry button. If the mic is denied, the banner says so and points you to Settings. Never a frozen screen that looks like nobody is speaking.