Radio with live captions and translation
Radio Dad can transcribe live radio speech into on-screen captions, then translate those captions into your language, all on your device. Turn captions on while a station is playing and the words appear as they are spoken. Switch on translation and a second line shows them in the language you read. It runs on-device, so nothing you listen to is sent anywhere, and it works on live broadcasts, not just podcasts. Captions cover more than 50 languages; translation covers around twenty. It is a Premium feature with a free preview, so for anyone following foreign news or learning a language by ear, it turns radio you could only half-follow into something you can actually read.
What live captions for radio actually means
Subtitles are normal on video now. Radio never got them, because radio is live and never stops. Radio Dad adds them anyway: while a station plays, it listens along and writes out the speech in real time, line by line, the way a live TV caption works. If the broadcast is in a language you do not read, it can translate each line as it lands, so you get the original and your own language together.
The result is a broadcast you can follow, not just hear. A Turkish news bulletin, a French talk show, an Arabic morning programme: you can read along while you listen, at your own pace, and glance back at the last line if you missed a word.
How Radio Dad does it
Everything happens on your device. Radio Dad uses Apple's on-device speech and translation, so the audio never leaves your phone: nothing is uploaded, recorded, or relayed through us. That is a privacy decision first, but it is also why captions feel immediate, with no wait for a server to answer.
To use it, start any station, tap the captions control, and pick whether you want the original, a translation, or both. There is a free preview so you can try it on a real broadcast; after that, Live Captions and translation are part of Premium.
What people use it for
Following foreign news at the source. Hear how a story is told where it is happening, in the original broadcast, and still understand every line.
Learning a language by ear. Real radio is messy, fast, and native, exactly the input a textbook cannot give you. Reading the captions alongside the audio bridges the gap: you catch the words you know and see the ones you do not. Point it at a station from Türkiye, France, Germany or Japan and listen with the net up.
Accessibility. If speech is hard to catch, a written line to read along with makes talk radio far easier to follow.
Which languages, and the honest limits
Captions can transcribe speech in more than 50 languages, including Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Hungarian and Hindi. Translation covers a smaller set of around twenty, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. A language outside the translation set, like Greek or Hungarian, can still be captioned in its own language, it just cannot be auto-translated yet. These lists come from Apple's on-device models, so they grow as Apple adds languages with each iOS update. The full, current lists are on our Support page.
Read the world.
Get Radio Dad for iPhone and turn on captions on any live broadcast. The preview is free.