Real-time Spanish translation on your Mac
Updated 2026-08-23
To follow Spanish as it is spoken — a telenovela, a Madrid client on Zoom, a clinic in Mexico City on the phone, a fast Argentine podcast — run Tingdong on your Mac. It listens to whatever is playing, detects Spanish automatically, and floats English captions over it while the sentence is still being spoken. Call Translation adds the other direction: you speak English, they hear Spanish.
How to set it up
- 1Open Tingdong and choose “Live Listen”
Pick “Screen sound” so it hears exactly what the show or meeting plays. Spanish is detected, not selected — Castilian, Mexican, Rioplatense, all of it.
- 2Press Start
Captions float over the player or the meeting window: Spanish on top, English below.
- 3For a call, switch to “Call Translation”
Choose Tingdong Microphone in the app’s mic menu, or hand an iPhone call to the Mac over Bluetooth. Your English reaches them as a Spanish voice; their Spanish comes back as English captions.
Fast Spanish, every accent
Spanish is spoken fast, and the accents that trip up generic speech recognition — Caribbean dropped consonants, Rioplatense “sh”, Andalusian endings — are exactly what you meet on a real phone call. Tingdong recognizes the language per phrase and keeps context across sentences, so a customer in Bogotá and a supplier in Seville get the same readable captions. For calls it is two-way: the person you are speaking with hears your words in Spanish alongside your own voice, and they install nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work for phone calls to Mexico or Spain?
Yes. Hand the iPhone call to your Mac over Bluetooth and Tingdong interprets both ways: they hear a Spanish voice alongside yours, you read their replies as English captions. Nothing to install on their side.
Does it handle different Spanish accents?
Yes. Spanish is detected automatically among 60 languages regardless of accent, and the original line stays on screen above the translation so you can always check a word.
Can it caption Spanish Netflix and YouTube?
Yes. It captures the audio your Mac plays, so any site or player works, including live streams with no subtitle track.
What about Spanglish — switching mid-sentence?
Language is detected per phrase, so a conversation that moves between Spanish and English just keeps working.
Try it on your next video, meeting or call
Download free for macOS100 trial credits on install · No signup, no credit card