Anyone who has watched an AV crew coax two hundred people into downloading a conference app knows the real enemy of live accessibility isn't the technology. It's friction. Stage Captions, a small Lithuanian company that launched publicly in early 2026, has built its whole product around removing it. Attendees scan a QR code and the captions appear on their phone. No app, no account, no instructions from the stage.
That's a genuinely good idea, executed well. Whether it's ready for your flagship event is a different question, and the answer depends on things the company hasn't told the public yet.
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Product | Stage Captions (stagecaptions.io) |
| What it does | Real time captioning and live transcription for events |
| Delivery | Browser based software, nothing to install |
| Based in | Lithuania |
| Launch | Early 2026, listed on Product Hunt, Uneed and Startup Fame |
| Technology | Automatic speech recognition, not human stenography |
| Languages | More than 60 live transcription languages and regional variants, plus a separate live translation offering |
| Mobile or desktop app | None |
| GitHub | No public repository; closed source |
| Free trial | 15 minutes, no credit card |
| Pricing | Custom quote only, no public price list |
| Transcript export | Not available yet, on the roadmap |
| Competitors it names | Interprefy, Wordly, SyncWords, AI-Media |
| Icon Polls rating | 3.0 out of 5 |
Built for one stage, then sold to everyone else
The origin story explains the product. The team needed captions for their own conference, found existing tools too heavy or too fiddly, built something simpler and ran it live before selling it. It shows. Stage Captions is narrow on purpose, aimed at conference organisers, AV crews, churches, schools, corporate comms teams and broadcasters who want captions on screens, in livestreams and on phones at the same time.
One thing it isn't: human captioning. There's nobody correcting the output in real time. If your event legally requires verbatim CART from a certified captioner, look elsewhere. To its credit, the company says this plainly.
Three steps, and they really are three
Create a room, choose the audio input and language. Share the viewer link or QR code. Display the captions wherever they need to go. That's the whole flow, and the presenter dashboard keeps the essentials together: audio input, caption output and current display delay in one view. It reads like something designed by people who've stood at the back of a live room.
Why there's nothing to download
Plenty of people search for a Stage Captions app, installer, OBS plugin or APK. None exist. The product lives at stagecaptions.io and nowhere else, so treat any file offered as a "Stage Captions download" on a third party site as suspicious.
Production integration works through a URL. You add the caption output to OBS Studio as a browser source, or feed it to Resolume Arena, a stage screen or a confidence monitor the same way. Our advice: rehearse with the scene collection you'll actually use live. Font scaling and safe area cropping trip people up more often than the captions do.
The cost of going browser only is resilience. There's no offline mode. If the venue network chokes, the captions go with it, so plan for a hardwired connection or a mobile backup.
GitHub searchers will come up empty
Live captioning has a lively open source scene, from browser speech demos to self hosted Whisper rigs, so it's natural to check for a repo. There isn't one, and there's no public API or SDK either. The integrations page describes browser routing, not developer access. Venues with in house developers who want captions piped into custom systems should raise this before signing anything.
Where captions live or die: the audio
The company says latency stays under a second in typical setups and that accuracy depends on clean audio. Both claims fit how modern speech recognition behaves, but no independent benchmark exists to confirm them. Two habits matter most. Take a direct feed from the speaker mic or mixer, not room audio. And fill the custom dictionary with speaker names, brands, acronyms and jargon beforehand. On a technical agenda, that's the difference between usable captions and confident nonsense on a big screen.
The accessibility library deserves a mention too. Guides on WCAG, ADA, the European Accessibility Act, California SB 707 and Quebec's Bill 96 are more useful than what several bigger rivals offer. They're also marketing, so confirm your obligations with someone qualified.
The price you can't see
This is the biggest drag on the score. There are no tiers, no per minute rate and no per room figure. Quotes depend on schedule, room count, viewer capacity and support level, and you get one by booking a demo. A guided pilot can be part of that conversation.
Quote based pricing is normal among Wordly, Interprefy and the rest. But Stage Captions sells itself as the open a browser and go option. The small organiser running an eighty person meetup is exactly who should love this product, and that person will often close the tab rather than fill in a demo form. The 15 minute trial proves the tool works; it can't tell you how it handles a full multi speaker session.
Other gaps: no transcript export yet, no published viewer capacity, and email support as standard, with live standby arranged on request.
Too new to have a reputation
Stage Captions is legitimate. It has published terms, a privacy policy, a security page, an accessibility statement and a reachable support address, and we found no fraud complaints. What it lacks is proof. Its G2 page had no reviews when the original version of this article was written, and there are no attributed case studies or third party accuracy tests. Every product starts here, but it's a real risk when paying audiences are watching.
How we scored it
| Category | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of setup | 4.0 | Three steps, nothing to install |
| Feature depth | 3.5 | Strong core, no export or API |
| Pricing transparency | 2.0 | Quote only, short trial |
| Accessibility resources | 3.5 | Better than several larger rivals |
| Track record | 2.0 | No verified reviews or case studies yet |
| Support and reliability | 3.0 | Email first, no offline fallback |
| Overall | 3.0 | Capable, but too early and too opaque to go higher |
Publish a starting price and ship transcript export, and this number moves. Until then: book the demo, run a full rehearsal with your own audio chain and speaker list, and get viewer capacity written into the quote. Got a favourite tool that just works in a browser? Make the case for it in our vote for the world's most useful websites.
Quick answers
Do attendees need an account?
No. Only the person running the session logs in. Viewers open a link or scan a QR code.
Who are the main alternatives?
Wordly and Interprefy for multilingual enterprise events, SyncWords for media and broadcast, AI-Media for automated plus human captioning, and certified CART providers where verbatim accuracy is required.
Can I keep a transcript?
Not yet. Export is on the roadmap, so don't count on it for an upcoming event.
