Your audio never leaves your device
Turn audio into SRT and VTT subtitles, free
Generate timestamped subtitle files from any audio, right in your browser. Export SRT and VTT for your video editor or player. Free, no signup, and your audio never leaves your device.
Takes a little extra time, and your audio still never leaves your device. Labels go by how voices sound, so treat them as a best effort: one person can be split across two or three labels, similar voices can be merged, and someone joining partway through may be folded into a speaker already talking. Giving a number usually helps. Check them before relying on them.
Specifying this number improves accuracy. Count people who really take part, whenever they join. Someone who only says a word or two is better left out.
Timestamps each word instead of each phrase, so short interjections like "Yeah" go to the right person. On a busy four-person recording this corrected about 1 word in 5; it changes little when people talk in long turns. Adds roughly 40% to the time on a computer, and almost nothing on a phone.
Phone audio loses the high frequencies that separate consonants, so they are put back before transcribing. Only phone-quality recordings are treated, and you are told when it happens. Also even out volume is for one case: someone far from the microphone and much quieter throughout. It cost accuracy on other recordings, so use it only if a quiet person came out badly.
Worth filling in. The speech model knows ordinary English, not your subject, so a word it has never heard becomes whatever sounds closest, and it usually gets that word wrong every single time it comes up. A sentence is enough, and the names and jargon in it are picked out and watched for. It cannot guess a word you do not mention, so name the people and the terms that matter.
Free, no signup. The first time you use it, it takes a minute or two to set up. After that setup is quick. Works with MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC and AMR, and long recordings are handled in parts.
Subtitles from audio, without an upload
If you have narration, a podcast, an interview, or a recorded talk, you can caption it without sending the file to a subtitle service. MeetingScribe transcribes the audio in your browser and gives you ready-to-use SRT and VTT files with timestamps. Because it runs on your device, nothing is uploaded, which is particularly useful when the video is not public yet and the caption file would otherwise be the first copy to leave your machine.
How to make a subtitle file
- Drop your audio file into the tool above.
- Leave timestamps on, and turn on speaker separation if you want names on the captions.
- Click Transcribe and let it run on your device.
- Open the Subtitles tab to check the timing, then download the SRT or the VTT.
- Load the file into your video editor or player as a captions track.
Which format should you actually pick?
The formats are similar enough that people pick at random and then hit a wall. The practical rule:
- Choose SRT for video editors, desktop players like VLC, and for uploading to platforms. It is the most widely accepted subtitle format there is, and almost nothing rejects it.
- Choose VTT when the video plays in a web page through an HTML5 video element. Browsers require VTT for a caption track, and will silently ignore an SRT.
The structural differences are small but strict. An SRT caption is a number, a timing line, one or more lines of text, and a blank line. Its timings look like 00:01:23,500 with a comma. A VTT file must start with the word WEBVTT on its own line, the caption number is optional, and its timings use a period, as in 00:01:23.500. Getting the comma and period the wrong way round is the single most common reason a hand-edited subtitle file fails to load. Both files exported here are already correct for their format.
Loading captions into common tools
- YouTube.In the video's subtitle settings, choose to upload a file, and select the option for a file with timing. Upload the SRT. Auto-captions can then be replaced rather than corrected line by line.
- Premiere Pro. Import the SRT as a captions item, then drag it onto a caption track above your video. Editing the text after import updates the burned-in output when you export with captions enabled.
- DaVinci Resolve. On the Edit page, import the subtitle file into the media pool and drop it onto a subtitle track. Styling is applied to the track rather than stored in the SRT.
- VLC and most desktop players. Give the SRT the same filename as the video and keep it in the same folder, and it loads automatically. Otherwise drag the file onto the playing video.
- A web page. Put the VTT alongside your video and reference it with a track element, marking it as captions or subtitles with the correct language code.
Making captions people can actually read
Automatic timing is accurate to the speech, which is not quite the same as being comfortable to read. If the captions matter, a short editing pass is worth it:
- Two lines maximum, and keep each line short. Roughly forty characters a line is the conventional ceiling. Long single lines force the eye across the whole frame and get cropped on phones.
- Break lines at natural phrase boundaries. Splitting between an article and its noun, or before a preposition, is measurably harder to read than breaking at a clause.
- Give each caption at least a second on screen. Very short captions from quick exchanges flicker. Merging two rapid lines into one caption usually reads better.
- Speaker names only when it is ambiguous. On screen, a name prefix on every line eats space that the words need. It helps in interviews and gets in the way in narration.
- Fix the text before you export. Edits made in the in-page editor carry into the downloaded files, so correcting names and terms there beats editing the SRT afterwards.
Starting from a video file
This tool reads audio, not video. If you have an MP4 or MOV, export or extract its audio track first as MP3 or WAV, then drop that in. Because the timestamps are derived from that audio, the resulting subtitles line up with the original video as long as the audio you exported starts at the same point as the video does. The step-by-step version of this, including the whole editor workflow, is in our guide to subtitling from audio.
Accuracy and long videos
A larger model gives more accurate text at the cost of a slower first download, and it is worth choosing for anything with music, accents, or crosstalk under the speech. Long recordings are transcribed in parts automatically and the timings are stitched back together, so a single subtitle file still lines up. The limit is reading the file rather than transcribing it, so past about an hour, caption in segments and combine the subtitle files in your editor, where offsetting a track by a fixed amount is a single operation.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between SRT and VTT?
- Both are plain-text subtitle formats with timestamps, and they are close cousins. SRT numbers each caption and separates seconds from milliseconds with a comma. VTT begins with a WEBVTT line, does not require numbering, uses a period before milliseconds, and supports positioning and styling that SRT cannot express. SRT is the safer default for editors and desktop players; VTT is what HTML5 video expects.
- Are the subtitles timed automatically?
- Yes. Timestamps are produced as the audio is transcribed, so the SRT and VTT files line up with the original recording without any manual syncing.
- Can the captions show who is speaking?
- Yes. Turn on speaker separation and each caption line can be prefixed with a speaker label, which you can rename to real names before exporting.
- My captions are offset from the video. What happened?
- Almost always the audio you transcribed does not start at the same moment as the video timeline, usually because it was exported from a trimmed sequence. Export audio from the full timeline starting at zero, or shift the whole subtitle track by the offset in your editor.
- Can I caption a video longer than an hour?
- Yes, in segments. Transcribe each segment separately, then either combine the subtitle files in your editor or adjust the second file's start times by the length of the first before merging.