Hearica Is Building Captions for Your Whole Computer, Not Just the App That Remembered to Add Them

The Macro: Captioning Is Everywhere and Somehow Still Broken

Here’s a thing that drives me slightly insane: we live in a moment where AI transcription is genuinely impressive, Zoom has live captions, YouTube auto-generates subtitles, and my iPhone can transcribe voicemails. And yet if you’re deaf or hard of hearing and you open a random Discord call, a browser-based video, a niche streaming platform that never thought about accessibility, or literally any audio coming out of your computer that isn’t from one of the five apps that remembered to add captions, you’re on your own.

That’s the gap. It’s not that captioning doesn’t exist. It’s that captioning exists in silos.

The productivity software market is enormous and still growing fast. Multiple sources peg AI productivity tools alone at somewhere around $8.8 billion in 2024, projected to nearly quadruple by 2033. The broader productivity software category is on a similar trajectory. Most of that money is chasing generic efficiency. Note-takers. Meeting summarizers. Writing assistants.

Accessibility sits mostly on the margins of that investment.

The tools that do exist for deaf and hard-of-hearing users tend to live inside specific platforms, which means they inherit whatever decisions those platforms made. Zoom captions are only as good as Zoom’s implementation. Same with Teams, same with Google Meet. Step outside those walled gardens and you’re back to nothing.

There’s a real hardware angle too. Apps like Apple’s Live Captions (built into macOS Ventura and later) moved in this direction, giving system-wide transcription. So the space isn’t empty. But Apple’s version is limited by language support and doesn’t give you export, translation, or the ability to add custom context to improve accuracy. That’s the opening Hearica is trying to walk through.

The Micro: A Floating Overlay That Doesn’t Care What App You’re In

Hearica is a desktop overlay. It listens to whatever audio your computer is outputting, not just audio inside a specific app, and transcribes it in real time. The floating window sits on top of whatever you’re doing, which is the key architectural decision here. It doesn’t integrate with Zoom or Slack or anything else. It just listens at the system level.

That’s actually a meaningful design choice.

Most transcription tools require some form of permission or integration on both ends. Hearica skips that entirely. If your computer can hear it, Hearica can caption it. A random podcast, a Twitch stream, a company town hall being run through some cursed internal tool from 2014. All of it.

Beyond live captions, you can save sessions and replay them with audio, which is useful for reviewing something you caught only part of. Export is supported, and translation into 60-plus languages is baked in, which opens this up well beyond English-speaking deaf users. There’s also a custom context feature where you can feed it terminology, proper nouns, or domain-specific vocabulary to improve accuracy. That’s the kind of detail that signals the team thought about actual use, not just demos.

It did well on launch day and ranked in the top ten on Product Hunt, which at minimum confirms there’s an audience paying attention.

The thing I keep thinking about is the overlay model. It’s the same approach that productivity tools like Hush have used to sit on top of your workflow instead of inside it. When it works, it works really well. When it doesn’t, it feels intrusive. Hearica’s version of this problem is a floating caption window that needs to be readable but not in the way, which is a genuinely hard UI problem to solve for every screen configuration imaginable.

I’d also want to know what the transcription accuracy actually looks like under real conditions. Custom context helps, but accents, crosstalk, and low-quality audio are where these systems fall apart, and that’s exactly when a deaf user needs them most.

The Verdict

I think this is a real problem and a reasonable solution to it. The system-level approach is correct. Trying to integrate with every app individually would be a nightmare and would always be one update away from breaking. Sitting at the audio output layer and transcribing everything is the right architectural call.

What I want to see at 30 days is accuracy data from actual deaf users in messy real-world conditions, not a clean demo video. At 60 days, I want to know if the overlay is sustainable as a UI pattern or if people are turning it off because it’s annoying to manage. At 90 days, the translation feature could become the product’s best story if someone makes a compelling case for it in international markets where accessibility tooling is even more sparse.

The comparison point to watch is Apple’s native Live Captions. If Apple expands language support and adds export, Hearica’s differentiation shrinks. That’s a real risk.

But for now, for the person who spends their day moving between a dozen different audio sources on their computer and needs captions for all of them, Hearica is solving something that nobody else is solving in quite this way. That’s a specific, defensible position. I’d rather they have that than chase a broader market they’re not ready for.