Video transcription and subtitle creation

Transcription turns spoken audio into written text. Subtitles take that text and align it with the timing of the video so viewers can read along. Same speech-recognition step, different output.

Try the subtitle generator →

Transcription vs. subtitles

A transcript is a continuous block of text — what was said, in order. It is useful for reading, quoting, and searching, but it has no timing information.

Subtitles are the same text broken into short lines and tagged with start–end times so they can appear on screen at the right moment. The SRT format is the standard way to store them.

The subtitle generator on this site produces subtitles directly, but since the .srt file is plain text, you can also use it as a transcript by stripping the timestamps.

How speech becomes subtitle text

Upload. You send an audio or video file to the server.
Audio extraction. If you upload a video, the audio track is read out for transcription.
Speech recognition. An open-source model converts the audio into words, with a start and end time for each segment.
Segmentation. The output is broken into short on-screen lines suitable for subtitles.
SRT formatting. Each segment is written out in the standard HH:MM:SS,mmm --> HH:MM:SS,mmm format.
Download. You receive the .srt file in your browser. The server-side copy is deleted right after.

Where transcripts and subtitles are useful

Interviews

Get a timed transcript of a recorded interview, then quote from it in an article, pull soundbites for social, or use the timestamps to scrub directly to the moment a particular line was said.

Podcasts

Long-form audio is hard to skim. A transcript turns an episode into a searchable, indexable page — useful for show notes, blog companions, SEO, and accessibility.

Online courses and lectures

Subtitled lessons are easier to follow, especially for non-native speakers and students reviewing recorded material. Many course platforms accept SRT directly.

Social media video

Most viewers watch short-form video on mute. A transcription is the base for either an .srt file or burned-in animated captions. For TikTok / Reels / Shorts, our sister tool Captions AI handles the burn-in step; the tool on this page produces the underlying text.

Business video

Product demos, webinars, and explainers benefit from captions in corporate feeds where audio is muted by default. Transcripts also make recorded meetings easier to skim and search later.

What affects accuracy

Audio clarity. Background noise, music, and overlapping voices hurt recognition more than anything else.
Microphone quality. A decent microphone close to the speaker beats a great room mic at distance.
Accent and dialect. Models do well on common accents but may stumble on heavy regional speech.
Specialized vocabulary. Product names, technical jargon, and proper nouns sometimes need a manual pass.
Language choice. Selecting the spoken language explicitly usually beats auto-detect, when you know it in advance.

Reviewing the output

For anything you'll publish, we recommend reading through the .srt once and fixing obvious mistakes. SRT is plain text, so it opens in any code or text editor — and most video editors let you edit captions directly on the timeline after importing.

File formats and size

The subtitle generator accepts MP4 video and MP3, WAV, and M4A audio, up to 100 MB per file. If your source is in another format or larger than the limit, use the Media Converter to re-encode it first.

Privacy

Files are uploaded to our server only to perform transcription. After the .srt is returned, both the uploaded source and the generated subtitle are removed from the server. Full details: Privacy Policy.