justin․searls․co

Live Captions for Audible books in iOS 26

I've wanted to start listening to books for Japanese practice in addition to just reading them, but the lack of an easy way to quickly understand a particular word always limited my ability to understand and enjoy it.

With iOS 26, the Live Captions Accessibility feature can be set to a number of languages (including Japanese) and routed to the system audio instead of the microphone. So while Amazon would be happy to sell you a "Whisper" license for both audiobook and ebook in order to get a less useful version of this functionality, your iOS device can just passively be building a transcript of the book for you to review as you listen. There's even a "Copy Transcript" button in the top right corner of the expanded view!

This is a great example of leveraging advancements in OS-level AI features to accomplish language learning objectives that would have been a fantasy just a few years ago.

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