# Simul: Live Captions — On-device live captions

> On-device live captions (iPhone/iPad app by 钊 邓.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/simul-live-captions/id6812948307 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [钊 邓](https://appshunter.io/developer/1208415342)
- Category: Productivity, Utilities
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 26.0 · 6 MB
- Languages: American English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified, China), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)
- Released: 2026-09-18
- Data updated: 2026-10-11

## What is Simul?

When you can't follow, just put your phone down.

Simul turns what you hear into bilingual captions in real time: the original on top, the translation below, sentence by sentence as they're spoken.

■ Entirely on this device
Recognition and translation both run locally. Audio and text are never uploaded and never touch a server. It works in Airplane Mode — go ahead and turn off your network right now and try it.

■ Where it helps
· Face to face: one conversation, every turn translated — whoever speaks is detected automatically. If it picks the wrong side, tap that half to switch it. Lay the phone flat between you and one tap splits the screen so their half reads right way up
· Lectures and meetings: set it on the table and follow the speaker line by line
· Video: play a foreign-language video out loud and read along on screen

■ Built to be read
Pure black, large type. The sentence still being spoken is dimmed and underlined; it settles once it's finished — so you always know which line can still change. Show both languages or just the translation. Caption size adjusts on its own, without changing your system text size.

■ Apple Watch
Read captions right on your wrist, and start or stop from there. Put the phone down without missing anything.

■ Also
· Speak the translation aloud so the other person can hear it
· Generate a summary of the conversation when you're done
· A Home Screen widget showing your current language pair — one tap to start
· Start from Control Center, the Action button, or Siri
· Continue on another device with Handoff

■ Language models download first
The first time you use it, Simul walks you through downloading the recognition model for your languages. Models are managed by the system and shared across apps, so they don't count toward Simul's size. Downloading needs a network connection — after that, you never need one again.

## Is Simul safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess Simul.

## Is Simul legit?

Simul: Live Captions appears legitimate, with a few gaps. The AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Simul is 65 out of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.


## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 1.4.0 — 2026-09-22

· New: History. Once a captioning or face-to-face session ends, it's saved on this device — read it back in full, or export a transcript or subtitle file. Titles are written by the on-device model, so you don't have to.
· Records stay with you: nothing is uploaded, and there is no cloud copy. Set them to delete automatically after 7 or 30 days, delete a single session, or clear everything. Turn saving off entirely in Settings.
· The home screen was rebuilt. Listen and Face-to-face are now two modes of the same button — pick one, tap once, and it starts. Face-to-face used to take two taps.
· The main button is always Start. If a speech model is missing, tapping it downloads it in place and starts on its own when ready. If a translation pack is missing, it starts anyway with source-language captions.
· Face-to-face now works out who is speaking on its own — no need to tap before each turn. If it picks the wrong side, tap that half to switch it.
· Older conversations saved without translations (because the pack wasn't installed at the time) can now be filled in from History.
· The interface follows your system's light or dark appearance. The captioning and face-to-face screens stay pure black — that's for legibility.

### 1.3.1 — 2026-09-21

· The captions card on your Lock Screen now actually shows up. In 1.3.0 the app deleted it the instant it was created, so the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island stayed empty — the one thing this app most needs to get right. The card has also grown from two lines to four, so a full sentence no longer gets cut off.
· Rebuilt translation language pack downloads. Closing the system download panel no longer counts as cancelling — the download keeps going. "Retry" doing nothing, and the screen not refreshing once a download finished, are both fixed as well.
· The app speaks up now when translation can't start. Before, every line just sat at "Translating…" without a word of explanation.
· Fixed the Stop button in the captions toolbar being squeezed down to "…". It's the most important control in a session, and in 1.3.0 it was three dots in every language.
· Fixed decimal numbers being treated as the end of a sentence, and captions no longer following the newest line once new text arrived.
· Session summaries are now written in the language you're reading. Before, a summary of an English lecture came back in English — the very language you needed translated.

### 1.3.0 — 2026-09-21

· Captions now appear on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. Start live captions, lock the phone, and the latest translation and the timer stay in front of you. When Face to Face pauses itself in the background, Resume is right there in the Dynamic Island.
· Haptics, throughout. In Face to Face the phone passes back and forth and your eyes are on the other person — starting, stopping, taking your turn and swapping languages are all things you can feel now, without looking down.
· An accessibility pass. At the largest text sizes the home, setup and Face to Face screens no longer push the main button off screen. Settings gains High-Contrast Captions, which also follows the system's Increase Contrast. With Reduce Motion on, the interface no longer animates.
· The watch screens and the various error messages used to fall back to Chinese for English, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese users. They now follow your system language.
· In the split Face to Face layout, Paused no longer sits underneath the swap button in the middle — and it appears on both halves, so the person across from you can see that the microphone stopped.

### 1.2.0 — 2026-09-20

· Face to Face, rebuilt. By default it's one upright conversation — every turn translated, and you tap the mic of whoever speaks next. The buttons carry the language names, so there's nothing to guess. Laying the phone flat between you? One tap in the title bar splits the screen so their half reads right way up.
· Text size is now adjustable from the running screen (Small / Default / Large / Extra Large), and Face to Face finally honours it. The old size was tuned for a much wider screen — English wrapped after three or four words.
· New: Pause. Stop mid-conversation without ending it — the transcript stays, the timer freezes, one tap picks it back up. Face to Face pauses itself when you leave the app; live captions keep running, so the lock screen still shows them.
· Fixed the screen claiming to be listening after a phone call interrupted it, when the microphone had actually stopped. It now says Paused, and resumes on its own when the call ends.
· Fixed the on-screen timer jumping back to 00:00 whenever the speech pipeline rebuilt itself.
· You can now change languages from the Face to Face screen instead of going back to the home screen.

### 1.1.0 — 2026-09-20

· New: Face to Face. Put the phone between you — one half faces you, the other faces them. Tap the half of whoever's speaking; the translation appears on the other side. Both directions stay open, so nobody switches languages.
· Fixed the app holding the microphone in the background after you left the captions screen — the Dynamic Island stayed lit, the phone got warm, and the next tap on Start reported that speech resources were exhausted. Leaving the screen now stops the session.
· Recover actually recovers now. It used to release only the system reservation, not the live speech session holding the resource; it now tears the pipeline down first. If that still isn't enough, it says plainly to force-quit the app.
· Fixed first-run setup writing Simplified Chinese as the source language when you picked Traditional Chinese.
· Fixed the home screen still showing the old language pair after you changed languages on the captions screen.

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## More apps by 钊 邓

- [Linn: Protein & Fasting](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/linn-protein-and-fasting/id6813356438)
- [Shelfclip](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/shelfclip/id6816360190)

All apps by 钊 邓: https://appshunter.io/developer/1208415342

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-10-11.*