How to watch Japanese VTuber streams with English subtitles (free, no install)
Published: 2026-09-09
If you follow Japanese VTubers, you already know the problem. The stream is live, there are no subtitles, and the clips with translations show up days later — usually only for the parts someone decided were worth clipping. Live translators are wonderful, but they cannot cover every stream, and they cannot cover yours at 3 AM.
This is a short guide to getting live English subtitles on any Japanese audio playing in your browser, for free, without installing anything.
What you need
- Chrome (Microsoft Edge also works). Safari and Firefox will not work
- A computer. Phones cannot share tab audio, so this does not work on mobile
- A one-time download of the speech recognition model (73 MB for the balanced setting)
That is it. No account, no extension, no payment.
How it works
Open LiveSub. It is a website, not an extension.
You give it the audio from one browser tab. It recognises the speech on your own computer, translates it, and shows the subtitles. Your audio is never uploaded anywhere — the recognition model runs inside your browser. That also means there is no per-minute limit, because nobody is paying for server time.
Step by step
- Open https://livesubweb.com/?lang=en in Chrome
- Under "Translate from / to", choose Japanese → English
- Under "What are you watching?", pick Balanced for a live stream
- Click "Start (share a tab)"
- In the dialog Chrome shows you, pick the "Chrome Tab" section, choose the tab playing the stream, and — this is the part everyone misses — turn on "Also share tab audio" at the bottom left
- Click Share
Subtitles start appearing about two seconds behind the audio.
If nothing appears, it is almost always step 5. Go back and check the audio checkbox.
Make it usable while watching
Click "Show in a floating window". The subtitles pop out into a small always-on-top window, so you can put the stream in fullscreen on one side and keep reading. This is the setting that turns it from a demo into something you actually use.
You can also switch between "Original and translation", "Translation only", and "Original only". If you are learning Japanese, keeping both is genuinely useful — you see the Japanese as you hear it.
Two features worth knowing about
The word list. Speech recognition is bad at names, and VTuber streams are full of them — character names, member names, in-joke vocabulary, game titles. Type the names into the word list, one per line, and they get corrected automatically. It also fixes the hiragana/katakana mix-ups that recognition constantly gets wrong, so ペコラ becomes ぺこら if that is how you wrote it. Spending two minutes adding the names you know will come up makes a real difference.
Transcript download. You can save the whole session as a timestamped text file with the Japanese and the English side by side. Useful if you want to write up a summary afterwards, or to go back and check something you missed.
Being honest about the limits
I would rather you know this before you try it than be disappointed:
- Names are the weak point. Personal names, character names and place names come out wrong fairly often. The glossary helps, but it is not perfect
- There is about a two second delay. This is not simultaneous interpretation
- Loud background music and overlapping voices reduce accuracy, which matters for gaming and singing streams
- It is machine translation. You will get the gist reliably; you will not get nuance, wordplay or jokes the way a human translator gives them. Please keep supporting the people who do that work
- If names or words keep coming out wrong and your computer is reasonably fast, switch to the Accurate setting. It is noticeably better with Japanese. You can switch while the stream is running — the subtitles do not stop
Why this exists
Most tools that do this either only work on one specific site (YouTube only, Netflix only), or they charge by the minute — one competitor charges around $9.90 for 120 minutes. Because the recognition runs on your machine, there is no minute counter here, and no list of supported sites. If it makes sound in a browser tab, it can be subtitled.
Try it on the next stream you would otherwise have skipped.