In a world where video content is king, subtitles and closed captions have become an essential component of the viewing experience.
Whether you’re watching a movie, a TV show, or a video on social media, subtitles can enhance your understanding, engagement and accessibility.
With more people consuming video content on their smartphones and tablets and the growing importance of accessibility for all, the need for accurate and automated subtitle generators is greater than ever.
And so, in this post, we’ll explore the 15 best auto subtitle generators in 2024 – designed to help you find the perfect tool to create subtitles that are clear, concise, easy to read and – perhaps – beautifully designed to match your video content.
Happy Scribe is a powerful tool offering both automatic and human transcription services, converting audio to text with an impressive accuracy rating of 85-99% in over 120 languages and 45+ formats.
Not only can you use Happy Scribe to generate subtitles – you can also use it to transcribe your audio files, which is super handy if you want to repurpose a podcast episode or longer video into a blog post or an ebook.
Happy Scribe’s machine (automatic) translation option offers accuracy levels of 80% (with a human option available promising 99% accuracy – at a cost of £1.50 per minute.)
You can import your files by uploading raw video, or by pasting a video URL.
Once uploaded, the app tells you how long it will take to generate your transcript, so you can get on with your day while Happy Scribe does the heavy lifting.
It does take a little longer than some other tools on the list, but we’re talking a matter of minutes here, so that’s not a huge problem.
In terms of accuracy – it’s a mixed bag. We found it pretty much nailed it with understanding words, but struggled with grammar – and occasionally context.
If you choose the free automated transcription offering, you’ll definitely need to at least have a check over your transcript and fix any errant full-stops or other mistakes!
Here’s an example from our test run:
Once you’re happy with your transcription, you can use the ‘Style’ button to edit the font, size, colours, background and position of your subtitles.
These options will be enough for many users but do lack some of the flexibility of other tools – for example, you can only move your position ‘up’ and ‘down’, not left and right. Also, these settings apply to the subtitles all the way through your video – there’s no option to move them up, or down, for individual scenes.
Once done, you can either download the video with the subtitles burned into the video file, or download the subtitles as an srt/vtt file.
Happy Scribe offers a really generous free plan, allowing you up to 5 files per month which compares favourably with lots of other tools’ free plan allowances. Videos exported under the free plan are un-watermarked which is exceedingly rare – and valuable – for free plan users.
With Rev.com, you can easily (and accurately) convert your audio and video files into written text and captions.
The platform has a user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to upload your files and get started with your transcription or subtitle project. You can also paste a link to a file – but unfortunately YouTube isn’t currently supported, which could cause you some headaches.
Rev.com offers a range of features, including automatic punctuation, speaker identification, and the option to include timestamps in your transcripts.
Their subtitle generator can create subtitles in various formats and styles, depending on your needs.
However, it’s not all good news: Rev.com’s pricing can be a bit high compared to other platforms, especially if you have a large volume of content that needs to be transcribed or subtitled.
To quantify this, we were quoted $7.50 to generate subtitles for a 4 minute video – with 99% accuracy.
This is a higher accuracy level than Happy Scribe, and with a quicker turnaround – but a higher price to boot. There were optional extra charges for things like rushed turnarounds – and even for burning the subtitles into the video file (with no apparent mention of style choices.) As ever, it’s about what’s important to you and how much you’re willing to pay.
There’s no free option to use Rev.com like there is for some other tools in our list – although you can sign up for a trial that gives you a certain number of minutes for free to give it a test drive. (At the time of writing, this was 300 minutes.)
We used our free trial to generate a txt transcription of one of our videos and, while it was on the whole pretty accurate, there were still a couple of mistakes.
VEED.IO is a powerful video editing tool that provides a range of features, including automatic subtitle generation. With VEED.IO, you can easily create high-quality videos with professional-looking subtitles in a matter of minutes.
In truth, subtitles are just one string to the VEED.IO bow – but it’s quite the string.
Start by uploading your file – there’s an option to upload by sharing a link, but YouTube links are again not supported. (Interesting sidenote: you don’t even need to create an account to start using VEED.IO.)
Once your video’s uploaded to the platform, select ‘Subtitles’ from the left hand menu. There’s an option to upload a subtitle file or type out your own manually, but what we’re interested in here is the ‘Auto Subtitle’ option.
Select which language is being spoken in your video and VEED.IO will do the rest:
When it comes to accuracy, VEED.IO is right up there with the best. It does make errors, like other tools, but it also highlights ‘low confidence’ words in orange and, in our experience, the non-orange text was pretty much spot-on. Proofread and check? Yes, of course. But you won’t be spending much time at all correcting errors, as it really doesn’t make many of them.
The real beauty of VEED.IO is that you can then give these subtitles various style treatments and options to match your brand. This takes something that’s a functional must-have and turns it into a real visual enhancement for your videos, with different typefaces, colours and even animated effects available.
Videos can be exported to MP4 format, with subtitles intact. Unfortunately free videos come with a very prominent VEED.IO watermark – and only in standard quality – although committed creators have the option to remove the watermark and download in HD quality by upgrading to a paid plan.
Subly is another innovative platform that simplifies the process of adding subtitles to your videos.
With its user-friendly interface and advanced AI technology, Subly provides a fast and accurate way to generate captions for your videos in over 40 different languages.
Start by uploading your video. You can upload a raw file, or enter a URL – including YouTube.
Under the ‘Subtitle’ menu you’ll find the option to add automatically transcribed subtitles.
Subly offers pretty good accuracy, although sometimes misses the mark when it comes to punctuation – throwing in a full-stop for mid-sentence pauses. It’s not the end of the world, of course, but it means you do need to go through and manually check the titles.
Subly really shines when it comes to its amazing style options. You can change the font, size, and style of your captions, including outline, drop shadow, or solid background.
Subly provides impressively granular options for where – and how – your captions display, including the number of lines of text, characters or words you want to appear on each line, and how long each subtitle should appear on the screen.
This all combines to give you quite a lot of control over how subtitles look and feel. You can create subtitles that are tailored to your specific needs and preferences – and save these settings as presets for future use, eliminating the need to tinker with them each time you add subtitles to a video.
The platform also allows you to resize your videos within the editor, making it easy to change the aspect ratio of your videos to fit different social media platforms – a great way to repurpose your video content in one place, without downloading any software.
If resizing creates bars on your video file, you can edit the colour or upload a background image to make your videos look more polished and professional.
Unfortunately – there is a catch – you can’t download your completed, subtitled video files without upgrading to a paid plan, which start at £14/month.
Zubtitle is a powerful but intuitive platform that lets you quickly and easily add subtitles to your videos.
Signing up for an account at Zubtitle, the first thing you notice is that there’s a pre-existing intro video called ‘Getting Started’ which lays out the basics of Zubtitle and how to use it. It’s a nice touch.
Click the yellow ‘Add New Video’ button and you can start work on your own video content.
Transcription is automatic, fast and – largely – accurate. There were a few mistakes and problems in our transcript – although these were mainly small errors.
Once you’ve clicked through and checked/corrected your transcript, you can go to the ‘Templates’ button (from the right menu) which gives a range of templates for your video subtitle treatment.
As well as being able to create your own templates, Zubtitle comes with a range of pre-made ones, designed to help you render content for various channels and uses. This includes different aspect ratios such as vertical and square, with captions arranged accordingly – a real time-saver for social video creators working across platforms.
You can use the options lower down the menu bar to edit text style – font, size, colour and more and make these templates your own.
You can also add motion to your captions (although these options are quite limited)…
Change the colour of your background canvas, where it appears, upload logos, and even add a progress bar with customisable brand colours – which is a really nice touch, especially for social, where viewer attention is in particularly short supply!
As you can see on our screenshots above… the free plan comes with a pretty chunky Zubtitle watermark, which may or not be a problem to you.
If it is, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan – at either $19 or $49 per month. This also ups the number of videos you can create per month, and unlocks the ability to output at 4K resolution.
Descript is a powerful subtitle and transcription tool designed to help users create high-quality subtitles for their audio and video content.
It’s the first item on our list that requires a software download – the other options being browser-based. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a pro or a con – it really depends on your personal preference!
That being said, once it’s installed, it works in pretty much the same way as many other tools we’ve covered. You upload your video as a new project and your file is then automatically transcribed. It’s a quick process that only takes a minute or two.
The transcription appears in the panel on the left hand side, with a playable video preview in the middle, and settings/options on the right. You can highlight snippets of text to correct any errors but – by and large – the transcription is pretty accurate.
Unfortunately we found it’s not all that straightforward to actually add this transcript to your video.
We stumbled upon the option by going into the ‘Help’ menu and finding ‘Quick Actions > Insert > Captions.’ This added ‘Captions’ as a layer to our project and, to be fair, it was then pretty straightforward to make cool changes to the look and feel of our captions, editing font, size, colour and more.
Descript offers tiered pricing, with a Free plan that allows 1 hour of transcription per editor per month, with 1 watermark-free video export. Who knows? That might be enough for less regular creators.
Pictory is a cloud-based platform that lets you create professional-quality subtitles for your videos with ease. With its advanced auto subtitle generation technology, Pictory helps you save time and streamline your workflow, making it an ideal choice for content creators, marketers, and businesses of all sizes.
The first thing that stands out about Pictory is that this is a BIG tool with a lot of features. It’s quite overwhelming, actually, to land on the menu and see the number of things you can actually do.
After a few minutes of vacant staring – and with some help from the on-site onboarding tools – we realised that the purple ‘Edit Videos using Text’ was the option we were looking for, and away we went!
You can upload videos from your computer, or paste a YouTube link to get started.
Transcription took a little longer than some other tools we’ve tried but it was worth the wait: this was really accurate. You can edit the transcription just like a word document, and you’ll see helpful pointers around the screen the first time you use it advising you how to do other things.
The ‘Templates’ area in the bottom right is the extent of the editing options. It still gives you a range of different options which are more than enough to do the job, but it’s less flexible than other tools.
Finally, the free trial gives you a limited amount of content, rather than monthly – 1 hour, 1 template, 3 videos. Once it’s gone, you’ll need to upgrade. It’s free to get started and try out, but if you want to use Pictory, you’re going to be paying for it.
Media.io is an online tool that offers automatic subtitle generation, among other video and audio editing capabilities.
It’s another tool where there’s no need to login or create an account before you play around with it. Just upload your video and you’re off to the races.
However, in order to generate auto subtitles, you WILL need to create or log into your Wondershare account.
Once your subtitles are generated – which only takes a minute or two – it’s a similar story to other tools, with three main options:
There’s a big problem with transcription – it doesn’t pick up punctuation. It got most of the words right in our transcript, but laid it out as one endless sentence. This clearly isn’t ideal and would require a little bit of time to work through and put right.
Media.io being a video editor tool, though, we should give them the benefit of the doubt and say: subtitles aren’t necessarily the main feature here – it’s one of many.
There are loads of other options to dig into here, making it a potential one-stop shop for video editing.
However, for free users, all your videos will be watermarked – with a 30 minute limit on exports, and a 1GB upload limit, unless you invest in a paid plan.
Kapwing is a popular auto subtitle generator that allows users to add captions and subtitles to their videos quickly and easily.
It uses advanced AI technology to generate accurate captions that can be customised to match the style and tone of the video.
As well as generating subtitles, Kapwing also offers a range of other video editing tools, such as trimming, cropping, and adding text and images. It’s a really powerful tool with a lot of features.
The free plan gives you a limited amount of transcription – 10 minutes per month, which is pretty restrictive, but – who knows?! That may be enough for your needs. Want more than that? You can upgrade to the ‘Pro plan.’
Transcription is fast and accurate, and you can make edits quickly and easily. From there, you can use the panel on the right hand side to make edits to the style of your captions – size, colour, style, animations and transitions.
The style options are really nice and up there with any other tool we’ve tried. Not only can you edit the font, size, colours and backgrounds – you can actually drag and drop your subtitles anywhere on screen.
Once you’re done tinkering, your completed video file with captions can be exported in MP4 format, in resolution of either 480p, 720p for free users, or 1080p for paid. (All videos exported under the ‘free’ package come with a watermark.)
Another nice feature of Kapwing is its ‘Show Safe Zones’ feature under canvas options. Clicking an option here will change your aspect ratio and edit your canvas to show where in-app features will display in YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels. This means you can reposition your content – and your subtitles – to be most visible and useful.
Flixier is a versatile video editing tool that boasts a powerful auto subtitle generator as one of its many features.
After uploading your video to Flixier, you’ll find the ‘Auto Subtitle’ option in the Subtitles menu. It takes a minute or so to generate your transcript, and the accuracy is super impressive – this is perhaps the most accurate transcription we’ve seen during our research.
Style options are right up there too – the tool offers a range of presets so you can choose the one that best suits your needs, but it also allows you to tinker and tailor for yourself. You can even upload a custom font if you can’t find what you need from the extensive list.
If we’re being hypercritical, it’s weird that the subtitles preview in the app are a little bit blurry – this certainly isn’t the case when you export the video – but it does mean using your imagination a little as the export doesn’t entirely match the preview.
All videos you export using the free plan carry a watermark, and you’ll need to upgrade to the pro plan to remove that – this will set you back $11 per month per user.
As well as removing the watermark, it’ll allow you to export 300 minutes of videos per month, export full HD videos, as well as giving you 50GB storage and 60 minutes of transcriptions.
SubtitleBee is an auto subtitle generator that uses AI to generate accurate and customisable subtitles for videos.
Navigation is really simple and stripped back – just upload your video (or paste a link) and you’re on your way.
Subtitles are generated automatically, and quickly. Transcription is okay, but other tools were able to do a better job – perhaps it struggled with the accent, but ‘without headaches’ became ‘with our’ headaches, and instead of ‘Hi, I’m Matt,’ we got ‘Hi I’m mat.’
We’re talking little niggles here but there’s so little to choose between some of these tools that it does make a big difference.
One good feature of SubtitleBee is the ability to preview in different formats such as Instagram Square and TikTok – rather than looking up specs for these platforms, you just select it from the list and you’re ready to export.
Style options are present, but not all that comprehensive – for example, you have a choice of 4 fonts (unless you upgrade), although you can edit font colour, background colour and size, along with other style choices.
You can reposition subtitles but only vertically (the ‘V. Position’ option) meaning you have some control over the positioning of your captions – but not as much as other ‘drag and drop’ tools give you.
On the subject of upgrading, the ‘Free Trial’ package will give you 1 (watermarked) export per month of up to 10 minutes in length.
Need to scale up? SubtitleBee has tiered pricing that lets you choose the package that’s right for you.
Nova.ai is a basic but powerful video editing tool that includes a robust auto subtitle generator, with a user-friendly interface that makes the process quick and efficient. They have an impressive client list including names like Disney and NBC Universal.
All your projects edited in Nova live on your own personal dashboard, and you can get started with a new one by hitting the ‘Create Project’ button.
From there, you’re able to either upload a raw video file, or paste the link to a YouTube or TikTok video file.
Once your video’s uploaded and processed, you can access the ‘Auto Subtitle’ tool from the Subtitles menu.
Transcriptions are pretty accurate, and can be quickly edited to correct any issues.
Once you’re happy, you can start to set your style. One cool feature of Nova.ai is that, as well as editing and tweaking the style of your title – font, colours, size, spacing and more – you can also save custom styles for future use. This helps you easily access them in future and build a sense of consistency across the subtitles in all your video content.
Titles can be dragged and dropped into whatever position you want them in.
Under the free plan, all videos are watermarked and you’re limited to a maximum export length of 10 minutes. This package also includes a limit of 30 minutes of subtitles and a 2GB upload limit. Pricing beyond this removes or increases some of these limitations, as well as getting rid of the watermarks.
FlexClip is an easy-to-use auto subtitle generator that uses AI to create accurate and customisable subtitles for videos, with a range of features including translation into multiple languages and support for a variety of video formats.
You can upload your videos for free, without even creating a login, so you can take a look at how it all works.
You will need to create an account to use the auto subtitles feature, though.
Transcription is pretty accurate – a few small errors, but nothing major, and nothing you wouldn’t be able to fix with a quick proof read.
You’re invited to choose a style before transcription begins – but this can all be edited once your subtitles are generated.
The style options are actually really comprehensive. As well as being able to use preset templates, you can also customise your font, text colour, background colour, size and more.
In terms of positioning, FlexClip is one of the tools that lets you drag and drop your subtitles anywhere you want on screen. It even includes helpful guidelines that assist you in dragging and dropping into the centre.
The free plan is pretty restrictive in most ways. You can only download 480p videos – which is noticeably rough. What’s more, these videos are all watermarked unless you upgrade to a paid plan. You also get just 5 minutes of subtitles per month, with a video length of up to 1 minute.
Maestra is a cloud-based auto subtitle generator that offers highly accurate and customisable captions for video content in 80+ languages, powered by advanced AI and machine learning technology.
You can upload raw video files or enter a link. Select audio language, and then your videos will be automatically transcribed.
The transcript appears in the left hand panel, with a watchable preview on the right. In our experience, transcriptions are pretty accurate. One of the cool features of Maestra is that it assigns a level of confidence to all words – colour coding words it’s less sure about within the transcript for you to give particular attention.
Now, the ultimate judgement of Maestra will really depend on your priorities.
There are no style options here – you very much get what you’re given, which is white captions in a black box.
But – on the other hand – there’s no watermark, and no apparent limitations on exports.
This means it’s a truly free tool to generate subtitled videos, unwatermarked and at scale.
EasySub is an intuitive auto subtitle generator with no upload size limit, with a claimed average transcription accuracy of 95%.
Starting a new project takes a little longer than it does on some other tools we’ve reviewed – uploading is a little slower, and transcription took around 3 minutes whereas most other tools tend to do it in a minute or so. No big deal for most people but something to be aware of.
The subtitle accuracy is pretty good, and again there’s the chance to click through and fix any little errors using the preview panel on the left. You can watch your video, with subtitles in place, on the right, to pick up any errors.
There are small but useful features – the ability to add a logo or text title to your video.
And then you’re into the ‘Subtitle Style’ options which let you change the font, size, text and background colours.
One drawback is that you can’t reposition your subtitles – and in fact, the player controls on your preview actually obscure the captions, so it does become a little fiddly.
However, once you’re done, you can export for a variety of different platforms in different sizes and aspect ratios.
Now, it gets a little muddled: EasySub is free to get started with, but exports AREN’T free.
Non-subscribers have to pay a one off payment of $1 per video. Subscribers to a monthly or annual plan can use the export function for free – with a range of paid plans available.
Subtitles and closed captions are becoming increasingly important for video content creators, social media managers, and businesses alike.
By adding captions, you can reach a wider audience, improve engagement, and provide a more accessible viewing experience.
At Wyzowl, we understand the importance of accessibility and inclusivity in video content. That’s why we offer subtitles and closed captions as standard on every video we create.
Our team of experts can help you create engaging and informative video content that speaks to everyone, regardless of their hearing ability or language.
Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you create videos that truly connect with your audience.
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