The Prague-based app, trusted by a reported 600+ theatres, operas, and theatre festivals, imports a show script, auto-detects the spoken lines, turns them into surtitles, and can translate them in one click — with real-time switching and a stream-to-phone audio feature on its roadmap.
2026-10-13 · by Moe Ameen
Captitles (captitles.com) is a Prague-based app for creating, translating, managing, and screening surtitles — the running caption lines shown above or beside a stage — for theatre and opera. Its homepage reports it is trusted by 600+ theatres, operas, and theatre festivals, with orchestras and recording studios also listed among its users. The pitch is to make captioning a live show something any venue can do in-house rather than a specialist job: import the script, and the app's AI detects the spoken lines, turns them into surtitles, and splits the longest lines into readable chunks. When no human translator is on hand, it can translate the surtitles into another language in one click, and colleagues can edit the styling, color, font, and alignment together in the cloud, "as in Google Docs."
The company frames this as an inclusivity play — captions open a performance to audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing and to international visitors who don't speak the language it's performed in. In the venue, the finished captions can appear on external screens or on each audience member's own phone or tablet through a companion mobile app, so a patron can read along discreetly from their seat. The desktop app runs on Mac and Windows and is free to download; paid plans are metered by shows, translations, team members, and screens.
Two of the most-discussed capabilities are still forward-looking. Automatic surtitle detection — AI that advances the captions in real time as the performance unfolds, so no operator has to cue each line — is described by the company as a feature it is developing. "Captions to audio," which would stream the translated spoken surtitles to a listener's earphones like a live podcast feed, is listed as upcoming. Treat those two as roadmap rather than shipped, and confirm the current state on the Captitles site before relying on them.
Captitles isn't new so much as revived. The team traces the idea to a gap they spotted in 2017 and an earlier "Subtitles for theatre" app that went on hiatus during the pandemic; they rebuilt it as Captitles in 2023 on newer AI. Importantly, it produces text captions and translations — not British Sign Language or any other sign-language interpretation, which some coverage has implied. If you need BSL, Captitles is not that tool.
Captitles solves accessibility inside the room. The harder problem for most companies is outside it: getting deaf, hard-of-hearing, and non-native-language audiences to know the captioned or translated performances exist and to book them. That promotion is owned-channel content work, and it's what [Kompozy](/) is built for — a content generation and publishing engine, not a captioning tool. Point it at your season announcement or a single production's details and it generates a [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) announcing the accessible dates to camera, a brand-exact [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes) of captioned-performance listings, [Quote Graphics](/glossary/output-buckets) pulling a line from the show, a blog explainer on your access provision, and an email newsletter — each held to one voice by a [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief). Then it schedules and publishes the set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email from one queue, on an [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) cadence behind a per-post review gate.
There's a neat symmetry worth using: the promo for a captioned, multilingual show should itself be captioned and multilingual. Every Kompozy video ships with burned-in [captions](/glossary/caption) so it reads in the sound-off feed, and because the engine produces net-new text per platform you can run a parallel pass in a second language to reach the exact international audiences a translated surtitle track is meant for. Captitles makes the performance accessible; Kompozy makes the fact that it's accessible travel. For the wider shift, see [multilingual auto-translated captions](/guides/multilingual-auto-translated-captions) and [closed captions in 2026](/glossary/closed-captions).
Captitles is a Prague-based app for creating, translating, managing, and displaying surtitles (the running caption lines shown above or beside a stage) for theatre and opera. You import a show's script, its AI detects the spoken lines and turns them into surtitles, and it can translate them into another language in one click. The captions display on external screens in the venue or on each audience member's own phone or tablet. Its homepage reports use by 600+ institutions.
No. Captitles generates text surtitles and translated captions shown on screens or audience devices; it does not provide British Sign Language or any other sign-language interpretation. Some coverage has implied a BSL workflow, but the product delivers written captions and translations, so sign-language provision is a separate arrangement.
The desktop app runs on Mac and Windows and is free to download, with paid plans metered by shows, translations, team members, and screens — a free tier, a monthly subscription, and a pay-per-day rental for festivals and short runs. Confirm current prices on captitles.com, as plans change.
Captitles handles the captions inside the venue, but filling accessible seats depends on marketing those performances where your audience already is. A content engine like Kompozy turns a season announcement or a single show into captioned announcement videos, carousels of accessible dates, a blog on your access provision, and a newsletter — and publishes them across social, blog, and email, including a second-language pass for international audiences.