Captions for Reels, TikTok and Shorts

Captions that are part of the video

The Reels & Shorts task in Wolfcaps makes captions for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. It listens to your clip, writes the captions, and draws them into the picture in the style you choose. The result is a new MP4 that you post like any other video. The speech recognition runs in your browser, on your own GPU, so the clip is never uploaded. There's no account and no watermark.

Burned-in captions or the app's auto-captions?

TikTok, Instagram and YouTube can add automatic captions of their own. Those appear in the app's style, and whether people see them depends on the app and on the viewer's settings.

Burned-in captions are part of the picture:

• Everyone sees them, in every app, whether captions are switched on or not.
• They look the way you designed them: your font, your colors, your highlight.
• You check the words before posting, so names and slang come out right.

The trade-off: viewers can't turn them off, and you can't change them after posting. To change something, edit the project in Wolfcaps and export again.

How to add captions to a Reel, TikTok or Short

1. 1Open Reels & Shorts and drop your clip (MP4, MOV or WebM, vertical or landscape). If the clip is on your phone, click Send from your phone and scan the QR code.
2. 2In Transcribe this clip?, choose the spoken language (English, Hebrew or Russian) and a speech model. The model downloads once, the first time.
3. 3Pick a Style, then adjust the Font, Text color, Highlight color, Size and Height.
4. 4Check the phrases. Click a line to fix a word the AI got wrong. Tap a word on the video to highlight it.
5. 5Choose the Video size and click Export video. Wolfcaps writes a new MP4 with the captions burned in.
6. 6Want it on your phone? Set Where to to My phone, click Send to phone and scan the code. On the phone, Save / Share… puts it in Photos or straight into an app.

Styles and word-by-word highlight

There are eight caption styles: Bold, Word pop, Karaoke, Highlighter, Box, Minimal, Hype and Reveal. Each one is a starting point. You can change the Font, Text color and Highlight color, the Size and the Height on the screen, and the number of Words on screen: 1 word, 2–3 words, 4–5 words or a full line. Outline, Box and ALL CAPS are there too.

The captions follow the speech word by word. Word pop, Karaoke, Highlighter and Reveal light up each word as it's spoken, and Reveal adds the words one at a time. Bold and Hype pick out a key word in the highlight color. In any style, tap a word on the video to highlight it, and tap it again to remove the highlight.

Keep captions clear of the app's buttons

TikTok, Reels and Shorts cover parts of the video with buttons, your name and the description. The styles start inside the safe zone. If you move the captions with Height into an area the apps may cover, Wolfcaps warns you. Turn on Show app overlay to see where the buttons and text sit on top of your clip.

Captions in another language

You can also caption a clip in a language other than the one spoken. Under Captions in, choose Translate to another language… and pick one of 20 languages, such as English, Spanish, Arabic or Hebrew. The translated captions are styled and burned in the same way. More about how translation works: translate subtitles.

What you need, and what doesn't work yet

• A computer with Chrome, Edge, Brave or another Chromium browser, or Safari 26 or newer on a Mac, and a GPU the browser can use (WebGPU). Wolfcaps doesn't run on iPhone, iPad or Firefox yet. Your phone can send the clip and receive the finished video.
• Speech in English, Hebrew or Russian. Other spoken languages can't be captioned yet.
• Exporting takes a while, because every frame is drawn again with the captions. You see the progress and the time left.

For longer videos where viewers should be able to turn subtitles off, use Video → subtitles instead: see add subtitles to video.