Parrovo
Turn foreign-language audio playing on your Mac into captions you can read.
It also interprets a conversation across the table.
Version 0.3.7 · ~3.4 MB · Requires macOS 14.2 or later · Notarized by Apple · Apple silicon and Intel
Two ways to use it
System audio
Translates what an app on this Mac is playing: a lecture, a recording, a video, the other side of a meeting. Whatever you are listening to, it captions.
Ambient sound
Listens through the microphone and translates the person in front of you. Wear headphones so the spoken translation reaches only you.
Captions float above everything
- They follow other apps into full screen instead of being hidden behind them
- Drag the window anywhere, change the text size at any time
- The original and the translation are shown together, which helps when you are learning or checking terminology
- Clicking the captions never steals focus from your meeting window
Languages
60 source languages, detected automatically. 29 of them can be spoken aloud, in one of eight voices, four female and four male. English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian are all included.
Paid by the hour, not a subscription
| Free on install | 5 minutes |
| After signing in with Alipay | 30 minutes |
| 1 hour | ¥7 |
| 5 hours | ¥29 |
| 20 hours | ¥99 |
| 50 hours | ¥229 |
Hours never expire. Once you sign in with Alipay they belong to that account, shared between the Mac app and the browser extension, and they survive a reinstall. Speaking the translation aloud uses credit four times faster. Silence is not billed.
Requirements and first run
- After downloading, drag Parrovo into your Applications folder before opening it. Launched straight from Downloads, macOS runs it from a read-only temporary location where its window cannot appear
- macOS 14.2 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel
- The first time you use system audio, macOS asks once for permission to record system audio. Allow Parrovo under System Settings, Privacy & Security, Screen & System Audio Recording
- Parrovo is not from the Mac App Store, so macOS confirms once on first launch. Choose Open. The download is notarized by Apple
A few apps do not hand their audio to the system capture interface. If you hit one, switch to ambient sound and let the microphone hear the speakers.
Privacy
Audio is captured only after you press start. It is streamed through our server to Alibaba Cloud's Qwen LiveTranslate model to produce captions, and is never recorded or stored, nor are the transcripts. Screen contents are never read.