Guide
How Live Captions works
A self-service page that takes you, step by step, through adding live captions and translations to your own nanocosmos stream — no support ticket needed. It's built for anyone broadcasting with a standard RTMP encoder (e.g. OBS) who wants spoken-language live captions, optional translated captions, and a downloadable transcript afterwards.
The whole journey lives on one page, broken into five stations. You always work on one station at a time — finished stations collapse into a short summary, and later ones stay visible (but dimmed) until it's their turn.
1 Sign in
Log in with your nanoStream Dashboard email and password, or with an API key if you have one. Forgot your password? Use the on-site reset link — no need to leave the page.
2 Your stream
Choose how you want to start:
- Create a new stream — the page sets one up for you.
- Load an existing stream — enter the stream name you already use.
- Reopen a previous stream — pick up a stream you configured earlier, with its caption settings intact.
If your account has recording enabled, the stream will be recorded automatically so you get a replay afterwards — this happens on its own, there's nothing to turn on here.
3 Live Captions
This is where you set up the captions themselves:
- Pick the source language — the language your presenter will actually speak.
- Optionally add one or more target languages to get translated captions alongside the original.
- Under Advanced options, choose the captioning engine: Deepgram for most content, or Deepgram, fast translation for fast-paced streams with rapid speech or fast-moving discussions.
- Click Enable Live Captions.
Once captions are active, a summary shows exactly what's live. If you need to change the source or target languages afterwards, you'll need to restart the stream for the new settings to take effect.
4 Go live
Copy the Server and Stream key into your encoder (OBS or similar) and hit Start Streaming. You don't need to tell the page you're live — it detects your encoder automatically and shows a LIVE banner with a Watch Stream button. Viewers who open that link can switch caption languages themselves if you set up more than one.
In the player, the pulse icon shows how quickly your captions and translations appear, with details and a downloadable report.
When you stop your encoder, the session ends on its own — no extra step needed.
5 Replay & download
A minute or two after you stop streaming, your replay is ready. From here you can:
- Watch the replay, or copy the replay link to share it.
- Download the captions as VTT, SRT, or TXT — whichever format your workflow needs.
- Download the latency report to see how quickly captions appeared, if you had the latency view open during the stream.
Want to run this again? Stream again lets you go live once more with the same stream (your previous replay stays available); Create new Stream takes you back to step 2.
Good to know
- Recording/replay availability is set up on your account by nanocosmos — it's not something you toggle per stream.
- Two captioning engines are available: Deepgram, and Deepgram, fast translation for fast-paced streams.
- Changing your caption languages mid-stream means restarting the stream — plan your language setup before you go live if you can.
- Replay downloads are available in three formats: VTT, SRT, and TXT.