Audible Captions was a feature announced in July 2019 that would display real-time text captions of audiobooks on screen using AI speech-to-text technology — similar to subtitles for audio. It was blocked by a copyright lawsuit filed by seven major book publishers before it could fully launch, and was discontinued following a settlement in January 2020.

Audible Captions used Alexa's speech recognition technology to display approximately three words at a time on screen as audiobooks played, with Audible acknowledging an error rate of up to 6%. In August 2019, seven major publishers — including all of the "Big Five" (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) along with Scholastic and Chronicle Books — filed suit in U.S. federal court, alleging the feature created unauthorized derivative works from copyrighted text. The Authors Guild expressed outrage in solidarity. Audible agreed to delay the planned September 2019 rollout. Following a January 2020 settlement, the feature was effectively discontinued and never launched beyond a limited set of public domain titles. This practice is included as a historical record of an Audible AI deployment that was halted due to legal action.