Live Captions in XSplit Broadcaster: Help More Viewers Follow Your Stream
Your stream has more to say than the picture alone can show. A viewer watching with the sound off misses your explanation. Someone who is deaf or hard of hearing needs another way to follow your commentary. And a viewer learning English might find it easier to understand a sentence when they can read it too.
Live Captions in XSplit Broadcaster turns spoken English into text while you stream. The feature sends captions to Twitch and YouTube Live, giving viewers another way to follow what you are saying. It is built into Broadcaster, so you can set it up from the same application you use to produce your stream.
What are Live Captions?
You might think of them as live subtitles. In Broadcaster, the tool is called Live Captions: it uses automatic speech recognition to turn speech from your selected audio device into text in real time.
The feature first appeared in the Broadcaster 4.6 beta and became part of the May 2026 release. Twitch and YouTube Live are the destinations tested in the release notes. This guide focuses on those two services.
Live Captions supports English speech. It is a way to read along with spoken English, rather than a tool for translating your stream into other languages.
Who benefits from a captioned stream?
Viewers who need or prefer text
Captions give deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers a text version of your spoken commentary. They are also useful when listening is awkward: on a busy train, in a shared office, or next to someone who needs quiet. Viewers learning English get a written reference alongside your voice.
Think of captions as another route into the same conversation. They support the spoken part of your stream; clear visuals and explanations still matter.
Gaming streamers explaining their decisions
A match shows what happened. Your commentary explains why you took a particular route, changed your loadout, or waited before making a move. Captions give viewers watching quietly a way to follow that explanation as well as the gameplay.
They are especially useful for strategy discussions, walkthroughs, and streams where your personality and reactions are a big part of the experience.
Educators and creators teaching live
If you teach a drawing technique, demonstrate software, or explain a complicated idea on YouTube Live, your audience needs both the demonstration and the words around it. Captions provide a written version of your explanation while viewers watch each step.
Keep important commands, names, and technical terms visible in your slides or scene too. That gives viewers an accurate reference if automatic recognition gets a word wrong.
Hosts running Q&As, demos, and presentations
Live captions are useful for creators answering questions and presenters explaining a product or sharing an update on Twitch or YouTube Live. They give viewers a way to follow the spoken answer even when they cannot comfortably listen.
For a stream with several speakers, check which audio device feeds the caption tool and test each speaker's audio before relying on captions for the whole session.
How to turn on Live Captions in XSplit Broadcaster
Start with an up-to-date version of XSplit Broadcaster and your Twitch or YouTube Live output configured. Then follow these steps:
Open Tools > Live Captions.
Check the Audio Device selection. Speak into the intended microphone and confirm that text appears in the tool.
Enable Send Caption to send generated captions to your stream.
For YouTube Live, also enable Closed Captions in the YouTube Live pre-stream dialog. In the screenshot in the support guide, the checkbox is labelled Enable Closed Captions.
Run a short test and check the captions in the destination's player before your main broadcast.
Seeing text in the tool confirms that speech recognition is running. Checking the destination confirms that viewers receive it. For the illustrated platform settings, use the Live Captions section of the May release support notes.
Get useful captions from your audio
Give the caption tool a clear voice signal. Keep your microphone at a consistent distance, avoid clipping, and keep music or other background sound from overwhelming speech. Speak naturally, with a little space between sentences.
Test with the words you actually use on stream. Game names, usernames, acronyms, and specialist vocabulary are useful checks because automatic captions can mishear them. For an essential name, number, or instruction, put the correct text on screen as well.
The original feature introduction describes speech recognition running on your computer's CPU, or a compatible Intel Core Ultra NPU when available. An NPU is not required to start using the feature. Check performance with your normal game, scenes, and stream settings running together.
Do you need Broadcaster Premium?
Live Captions is included in both Free and Premium, according to the current Broadcaster feature comparison.
Other plan limits still apply. The comparison lists Free for personal use and Premium as including commercial use, so check the plan that matches your intended stream, especially for business presentations and paid work.
Try it on your next stream
Choose a stream where your explanation matters: a walkthrough, a tutorial, a Q&A, or a live demo. Turn on Live Captions, check the audio input and destination settings, and test a few sentences before going live.
Get XSplit Broadcaster for Windows, then open Tools > Live Captions and give your viewers another way to follow along.
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