Translate YouTube Videos in Real Time — While You Watch

YouTube has auto-generated captions on many videos, and Google Translate can technically translate them — but the experience is clunky. You have to pause the video, navigate to the caption settings, select a language, and hope the captions were accurate enough to translate well. For videos without any captions at all, you're out of luck.

If you're watching a fast-paced tutorial, a live commentary, or a foreign-language creator you love, stopping every 30 seconds to fiddle with settings completely kills the flow. And translated auto-captions are often so mistranslated they're harder to follow than the original.

Overline takes a completely different approach. Instead of relying on YouTube's caption system, it listens directly to the audio playing in your browser tab.

• Tab audio capture — Overline uses Chrome's tab audio API to stream audio from the YouTube tab.
• AI transcription — The audio is transcribed in real time using Deepgram's streaming speech recognition, one of the fastest in the industry.
• Live translation — The transcript is instantly translated by Google's Gemini model into your chosen language.
• On-screen overlay — The translated captions appear as a semi-transparent bar overlaid directly on the video, just like native subtitles.

The whole pipeline runs in under a second. You never leave the YouTube page, and you never need to configure anything inside YouTube itself.

Overline currently supports 10 languages for both transcription and translation:

• English, Persian (Farsi), Arabic
• Spanish, French, German
• Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Portuguese

You can watch a video in any of these languages and translate it into any other. More languages are on the roadmap. The language switcher is a one-click pill inside the extension popup — no settings menus to dig through.

Getting Overline running on YouTube takes under 60 seconds:

• 1. Install Overline from the Chrome Web Store and sign in with your Google account.
• 2. Open any YouTube video. It works on regular videos, playlists, and embedded YouTube players on other sites.
• 3. Click the Overline icon in your Chrome toolbar to open the popup.
• 4. Select your target language and hit Start Captions.
• 5. Watch. Captions appear on the video within milliseconds of the speaker's words.

When you're done, click Stop. Your full transcript is automatically saved to your account history, ready to export as TXT or SRT.

Overline on YouTube fits a wide range of use cases:

• Language learners watching authentic content in their target language with a translation safety net.
• Researchers and students following foreign-language academic lectures or talks.
• Professionals watching international industry content, keynotes, or tutorials from creators who don't publish in their language.
• Hard-of-hearing viewers who need reliable captions on videos that don't have them.

If the audio plays in a browser tab, Overline can caption it — YouTube is just the most common place people use it.