Generate YouTube captions and subtitles with AI
Accurate captions boost watch time, accessibility and search visibility — but auto-generated YouTube captions are often riddled with errors, and manual captioning eats hours. AI Subtitle Studio transcribes your own video files locally with AI, producing an SRT or VTT file you can upload straight to YouTube Studio.
Why creators caption their own videos instead of relying on YouTube's auto-captions
YouTube generates automatic captions for you, but they're frequently wrong on names, brands, technical terms and anything spoken quickly or with an accent — and once a video is published, editing those auto-captions is slow, one line at a time, inside YouTube Studio.
Generating your own caption file first means:
- You control accuracy before anything goes live, using a Vocabulary hint field to teach the AI your channel name, guests, products or recurring terms.
- You get a real SRT or VTT file you can edit, translate, reuse for a video description transcript, or archive — not something locked inside YouTube's editor.
- Nothing about your unreleased video touches a third-party cloud service before you're ready to publish it.
How it works
AI Subtitle Studio transcribes the video file sitting on your own computer — your export from your editor, or your raw recording — using Whisper AI speech recognition running entirely offline. That is what this guide covers: producing an accurate caption file for footage you own.
It is a different job from reading the captions a published video already has. If that is what you need — pulling the existing transcript out of a video on YouTube — see how to transcribe a YouTube video to text, which is free and takes seconds.
Add a Vocabulary hint (e.g. your channel name, co-host names, recurring jargon) so the AI recognizes them correctly instead of guessing a similar-sounding common word. You can even auto-generate this hint with AI from your show/channel name.
Exporting for YouTube
Once transcribed, open the result in the built-in editor to review and fix any lines, then export as SRT or VTT — both formats YouTube Studio accepts directly under Subtitles → Upload file. SRT is the safer default; VTT is the native web caption format if you're also embedding the video elsewhere.
Batch captioning your backlog
Got a backlog of uploaded videos with no captions, or a channel with a weekly upload schedule? Queue multiple video files on the Dashboard and run Transcribe across all of them in one batch — each one processed unattended, ready to export and upload when you check back.
Reaching a global audience
Once you have an accurate English (or any source-language) caption file, translate it into other languages with AI subtitle translation and upload multiple caption tracks to the same video — a well-known way to grow view count from non-English-speaking audiences without re-recording anything.
How to caption a YouTube video
- Add your video Drag your exported video file (or raw recording) into the Dashboard — MP4, MKV, MOV and most common formats are supported.
- Set language and add a vocabulary hint Pick the spoken language, and optionally list channel names, guests or recurring terms so the AI transcribes them correctly.
- Transcribe Run AI transcription — Whisper processes the audio locally and produces a fully timed subtitle.
- Review in the editor Skim the result, fix anything that needs a tweak, and optionally run Cleanup to tidy filler words and formatting.
- Export as SRT or VTT and upload Export the caption file, then upload it in YouTube Studio under Subtitles → Add language → Upload file.
Caption your next upload for free
Free to try on Windows & macOS · full version $9.99 one-time · 100% offline