Real-time French translation on your Mac

How to set it up

1. 1
   Open Tingdong and choose “Live Listen”

   Set the source to “Screen sound” so it captions the film or the call audio rather than the room. French is detected, not selected.

2. 2
   Press Start

   Captions float over the player or the meeting window: French on top, English below, appearing before the sentence has finished. The translation can be read aloud instead if you prefer to listen.

3. 3
   For a call, switch to “Call Translation”

   Choose Tingdong Microphone in the mic menu of FaceTime, Zoom or another desktop calling app, or hand an iPhone call to the Mac over Bluetooth. You speak English, they hear French.

Why spoken French defeats word-by-word tools

French erases its own word boundaries: liaison glues the end of one word to the start of the next, unstressed vowels drop out entirely in casual speech, and most inflectional endings are silent, so the difference between one speaker and several often lives in a single unstressed syllable. Tools that transcribe and translate one short line at a time have nothing to disambiguate with. Tingdong works on a continuous stream and keeps context across sentences, which is what makes a fast talk show or an argumentative meeting readable instead of merely transcribed. Québécois, Belgian and West African French are all just French to the detector, and a colleague dropping an English term mid-sentence does not break anything, because the language is detected per phrase rather than fixed for the session.

Frequently asked questions