Give your TikTok video real captions

TikTok's own auto-captions are rendered by the app at watch time, not baked into the video file, but that also means they can't be exported, don't survive a repost anywhere else, and can't be fixed word by word without regenerating the whole pass. Generating a real transcript first, as an SRT you burn in with an editor, or a VTT for wherever you post it besides TikTok, gets you captions you actually own.

What TikTok's built-in captions actually give you

TikTok's auto-caption feature draws the text over the video in-app, and viewers can toggle it off from the share panel, so it isn't literally part of the video image. What it also isn't is a file: there's no SRT to download, no way to fix a single misheard word without regenerating the whole caption pass, and no way to carry those captions to another platform. Repost the same clip to YouTube Shorts and you're starting over.

The alternative: caption before you export

1. Transcribe your clip here. Audio is extracted from video in your browser before anything is sent for transcription.
2. Correct any misheard words directly in the editor; forced alignment means a fix keeps the right timing rather than needing to be retimed by hand.
3. Export as SRT or FCPXML and burn the captions in with CapCut or Premiere, styled however you want, or export VTT if you're posting somewhere that takes a caption track.
4. Post the finished video to TikTok with captions already correct and already yours to reuse on every other platform.

When TikTok's own captions are good enough

For a low-stakes clip you're only ever posting to TikTok, where a wrong word or two doesn't matter, the built-in pass is faster and free. The tradeoff is portability: nothing to edit, nothing to export, nothing to reuse. For anything you're also posting elsewhere, or where accuracy matters, generating the transcript once and captioning it properly is the better trade.

Frequently asked questions