Frequently asked questions
What Echo Captions does, what it costs, and what it does with your data. Short answers, all of them true of the extension as shipped.
Is Echo Captions free?
Yes, free to start, with no card. Without an account you get about 4 minutes of video a day, and about 20 minutes on your first day so you can properly try it. Sign in with Google or email and the free plan gives you about 8 minutes a day. If you watch more than that, Echo Lite is $1.99 a month for about 1 hour of video a day, Echo Pro is $3.99 for about 4 hours a day, and Echo Unlimited is $15.99 for all-day watching under a fair-use limit. You can cancel anytime, and there is a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Do I have to turn Echo on for every video?
No. On YouTube and Crunchyroll, translated captions start by themselves as soon as a video plays; on YouTube, the Echo button in the player turns them off and on. On live streams (YouTube Live, Twitch, Kick) you click the Echo button once to start.
Does Echo work on Twitch and Kick live streams?
Yes. Open the stream, click the Echo button in the player controls, and translated subtitles appear over the stream about a second after people speak, in most languages. Past broadcasts on Twitch and Kick work the same way. Echo listens with real-time speech recognition and translates as people talk, so it works on streams that have no captions at all. Live translation uses your daily allowance faster than a regular video, because it runs continuously.
Which spoken languages work on live streams?
Live translation understands streams spoken in more than 60 languages — Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and many more — and translates them into any of the 81 languages. When several people talk, each voice gets its own color. YouTube videos work in any language as long as they have captions.
Which languages can Echo translate into?
81 languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Odia, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yoruba, Zulu. Your language is detected from the browser and can be changed anytime in the popup. Dual-language mode shows the original line and the translation together.
How is Echo different from YouTube's auto-translate?
YouTube's auto-translate only works when a video already has a caption track, translates it line by line with machine translation, and only exists on YouTube. Echo translates with a language model tuned for spoken speech, so slang, fillers and names come out the way a person would say them; on live streams it listens with speech recognition, so it works even when there are no captions at all; it covers YouTube Live, Twitch, Kick and Crunchyroll, not just YouTube; and it adds things YouTube has no equivalent for: dual-language subtitles, a click-to-seek transcript inside the player, and lazy translation that only translates what you actually watch. If a video has good captions and you just need the gist, YouTube's built-in option is free and fine.
Why don’t translated captions show up on a YouTube video?
Echo translates a YouTube video from its captions, including the ones YouTube makes automatically. If a video has no captions at all, Echo can’t translate it yet. Try another video to check that Echo works, and reload the page if you have just installed or updated it. Live streams don’t need captions.
The captions are in the wrong language. How do I change it?
Open the Echo popup and choose your language under Captions in, right on its home screen. The first time Echo translates for you, a card on the first translated line also offers a quick switch. Echo starts with your browser’s preferred language.
Why did the captions stop?
Most likely you have used today’s allowance; a notice appears in the subtitle area when that happens. The allowance resets every day at 00:00 UTC. Signing in raises the free allowance, and a paid plan raises it much further.
Does Echo work on Crunchyroll?
Yes. Crunchyroll offers subtitles in a handful of languages. Echo reads the episode’s official English subtitle track, translates it into your language and hides the built-in subtitles, so you watch with subtitles in Turkish, Hindi, Dutch or any other of the supported languages. Because Echo works from the official track, the timing stays exact.
Do I need an account?
Not to try it. Install Echo and it works as a guest. Signing in with Google or email raises the free daily allowance and is required for a paid plan, since that is how the extension knows which plan you are on.
Is my audio recorded?
No. Audio is only captured on live streams, after you click Echo; it is streamed in short chunks to the speech-to-text provider to make the subtitles and is not stored on servers we control. Transcripts and translations live in your browser while the page is open. Echo does not track which videos or streams you watch. The privacy policy has the full list of what is processed.
Which browsers does Echo support?
Echo is built and tested for Google Chrome, installed from the Chrome Web Store. Other Chromium-based browsers that accept Chrome Web Store extensions, such as Edge, Brave, Arc and Opera, generally work as well, but Chrome is the one we support.
Can I move to a bigger plan?
Yes. On your account page, choose Upgrade next to the plan you want. You pay only the difference for the rest of your current billing period, the bigger daily limit works right away, and your renewal date stays the same. To move to a smaller plan, cancel and pick it when your current period ends.
How do I cancel or get a refund?
Open your account page and choose Manage subscription; billing is handled by Paddle, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period. Refunds follow the 14-day money-back policy.
Updated 2026-10-18. Something missing? Ask support or read the guides.