TikTok caption generator

Why burned-in captions rather than a subtitle file

TikTok does not accept .srt uploads. The only way to get captions onto a TikTok video from outside the app is to render them into the frames themselves, which is what this tool does — the words become part of the picture, so they survive re-uploads, cross-posting to Reels and Shorts, and being watched with the sound off.

Burned-in captions are also the only kind you can style. TikTok's own auto-captions come in one look; here the words can be big, outlined, and highlighted one at a time as they are spoken, which is what most short-form video does now for a reason — it holds attention through the first three seconds.

Your video never leaves your device

Only the audio is sent away, and only to be transcribed. The video itself is read straight off your disk, decoded in the browser, drawn to a canvas with the captions on top, and re-encoded locally. Nothing about the picture is uploaded anywhere, and nothing is stored on a server afterwards.

That also makes it fast: there is no upload of a large file and no wait in a render queue. A minute of 1080p typically takes well under a minute to export on a normal laptop.

Word-by-word timing

Speech recognition returns a timestamp for every word, not just for each line, which is what makes the karaoke and highlight styles possible — the colour moves with the voice rather than jumping a whole caption at a time.

It is also what makes editing safe. Splitting a caption in two splits it on a real word boundary, so both halves keep the true timings of the words they contain instead of the split guessing at a midpoint.

Reframing for vertical

Footage shot in 16:9 can be cropped to 9:16, 1:1 or 4:5 before export, with zoom and position controls to bring the subject back into frame. Choose to fit instead of fill and the gaps are padded with a colour of your choosing.

Captions in other languages

Captions can be generated in the spoken language or translated into any of the 76 supported ones. Non-Latin scripts are handled properly: if the preset's font has no glyphs for Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Thai or Korean, a font that does is substituted automatically and the rest of the style — outline, highlight colour, animation — is kept.

How to add captions to a TikTok video

There are two routes, and which one you want depends on whether you care what the captions look like.

Inside the app, TikTok can generate captions for you after you record or upload: it transcribes the audio and lets you correct the wording before posting. It is free and it takes no setup, but the result is TikTok's one house style — a fixed font at a fixed size, a whole line at a time — and it lives with the post rather than in the file, so it does not follow the video to Reels, Shorts or anywhere else.

The other route is to caption the video before it ever reaches TikTok, which is what this page does: drop the file in, the audio is transcribed with a timestamp on every word, you pick and adjust a style, and the export is an MP4 with the words already drawn into the frames. You upload that file to TikTok exactly as you would an uncaptioned one, and the captions are part of the picture from then on.

When TikTok's auto captions will not do it

TikTok's own caption generator does not run on every video. The most common wall people hit is on audio it identifies as commercially licensed — a trending song, a film or TV clip — where it declines to transcribe and returns a copyright restriction rather than a caption track. It can also simply produce nothing usable on quiet, noisy or heavily accented audio, and it is limited to the languages it supports rather than the language you actually need.

Captioning before upload is not subject to any of that. The transcription happens here, on the audio as it exists in your file, and what TikTok receives is a finished video with the words already in the frames — there is nothing left for it to generate, and so nothing for it to refuse.

Fonts and caption styles

The look is the reason most people caption outside the app. There are 28 presets covering what short-form video actually uses — heavy sans faces with a thick outline, one or two words on screen at a time, the current word picked out in a bright colour as it is spoken, a pop or slide as each one arrives.

Every part of a preset is yours to change: typeface, size, colour, outline weight and colour, background box, vertical position, how many words appear at once, and the animation. Set it once and the whole video follows it, so a series of posts keeps one look instead of being re-styled by hand each time.

How to edit captions on a TikTok video

Before posting, TikTok lets you correct the wording of the captions it generated and drag the block around the frame. That is the whole of it: the text and the position, not the typeface, the size, the colour, how many words are on screen at once, or whether they animate.

After posting there is no editing at all. TikTok's captions are baked into the published post, and changing so much as a misheard word means deleting the video and uploading it again, which costs you whatever reach it had already earned.

Captions rendered into the file before upload avoid both limits. Everything is editable right up to the moment you export - wording, timing, splits, style - and because the export is just an MP4, fixing something after the fact means re-exporting and re-uploading rather than starting the post from nothing.

Turning captions on when you are watching

This is the other question people arrive with, and it is worth separating from the rest of the page: how do you see captions on someone else's video. If the creator used TikTok's caption feature, a CC button appears on the video and toggles the track on or off; TikTok also carries a global setting for whether those tracks show by default.

Neither control touches captions that were drawn into the picture. Those are part of the video itself, so they show for every viewer regardless of any setting - which is exactly why creators burn them in rather than relying on a track the audience can switch off or never switched on.