How to add captions on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts

All three apps make captions the same way: speech recognition listens to the video and writes out what's said. Where they differ is where you turn them on, how you fix them and what viewers can do with them:

That last row is the catch for anyone posting one clip to all three. App captions belong to the app, not the file, so you'd check and fix the same words three times, and each app draws them its own way. More on that below.

TikTok's auto captions transcribe your speech and show it as text on the video. TikTok described the steps when it launched them:

1. Record or upload your video, and go on to the editing page.
2. Select auto captions (in TikTok's words, “tap the autocaptions icon”). TikTok transcribes what's said.
3. Read the captions through and edit any words it got wrong: TikTok says creators can edit the text once it's generated.
4. Post. The captions appear on the video once it's published.

On the viewer's side, the captions can be turned off: TikTok says a viewer opens the share panel, taps the captions button and sets captions to off. Since July 2022, viewers can also turn on closed captions for videos themselves, and TikTok added translations of captions and video descriptions, in a first batch of English, Portuguese, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish.

Auto captions launched in April 2021 in American English and Japanese. TikTok's help center, which would show today's languages and button names, doesn't load for us, so if you don't see the option, check that the video's language is one your app offers. If you edit in CapCut instead, its auto captions are covered in how to make clips in CapCut.

Instagram has two kinds. Closed captions are made automatically from the speech and shown as text at the bottom of the reel, and viewers can turn them on or off. The Captions sticker puts generated captions on the video itself, as part of what you make.

To turn on closed captions before you share a reel, from Instagram's help for iPhone:

1. Tap Create at the top (or swipe right in Feed), then Reel at the bottom.
2. Choose a video from your camera roll and tap Next, then Next again.
3. Tap More options and turn on Enable closed captions. To offer viewers a translation, also turn on Translate closed captions.

For a reel you've already shared, open it from your profile, tap Options, then Edit, then More options, and use the same two switches (some versions put them under Advanced settings). Reels you posted before follow your caption settings.

The Captions sticker: after choosing the video, tap Stickers, then Captions to generate them. Viewers choose for themselves: on a reel, tap Options, then Closed captions, and pick Always show or Never show; or set it for every video under Profile, Menu, Accessibility and translations, Captions and translations.

Two limits from Instagram's help: captions “may not be available to everyone”, and these tools aren't available on a computer, only in the app.

Edits is Instagram's video editing app, launched in April 2025, free, on the App Store and Google Play. You sign in with your Instagram account and export without a watermark. Its captions tool does more than the Reels editor's:

1. Open a project and tap Captions.
2. Choose the language spoken in the video and a caption style.
3. Set the transcription controls: punctuation, title case, and whether to show curse words.
4. Tap Generate Captions.

Then select the captions layer to change it: Style for the look, Edit for the words, Opacity, Bilingual to change the language, and Move for where they sit. To change when a caption shows, tap and hold its clip on the timeline to move it, or drag either end. Meta has since added bulk editing of captions and fonts for Devanagari and Bengali-Assamese scripts, and in April 2026 it said more caption upgrades, including bilingual captions, were coming.

Because they're a layer in your edit, Edits' captions are part of the video you export, so they show wherever you post it, not just on Instagram.

YouTube makes automatic captions with speech recognition, for long videos and Shorts alike, in more than 60 languages. When they're available, they're published on the video for you, though they may not be ready right after you upload. YouTube says they may not appear at all when the language isn't supported, the sound is poor, there's a long silence at the start, or several people or languages overlap.

To fix automatic captions on a Short, in YouTube Studio:

1. Select Subtitles in the left menu, and choose the Short.
2. In the “Subtitles” column, select Edit. For automatic captions, select Duplicate and edit, then Continue.
3. Change the words in the caption track, then select Publish. YouTube saves your fixes as a new caption track.

You can also upload a subtitle file from the same page: see how to add subtitles to a video. Two other YouTube tools put captions on the picture:

• Shorts made in YouTube Studio. Open a long video under Content, choose Clips and Shorts, and start a Short from part of the transcript. Where available, YouTube adds auto-captions from the transcript, and Captions in the bottom left of the preview changes their color, font, style and position, or turns them off. Turning a long video into Shorts is covered in YouTube video to Shorts.
• YouTube Create, YouTube's editing app. Tap Captions in the toolbar, choose all speech or just voiceovers, pick the language and tap Generate; then Edit to fix a word and Style for size, font, color, outline and shadow. It can't caption clips longer than 60 seconds, and it runs on Android phones with at least 4 GB of RAM and iPhone XR and newer running iOS 17 or later, in the countries YouTube lists.

Viewers turn captions on in YouTube's player (tap the video, then Closed captions), or always, in Settings, Captions.

Every app's captions are a draft. YouTube says its automatic captions “might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise”, and the same goes for the others. Names, numbers and slang are where they slip; the full checklist is in how to caption short videos. Where to fix them:

• TikTok: on the editing page, before you post.
• Instagram: in Edits, select the captions layer and tap Edit.
• YouTube: in YouTube Studio, Duplicate and edit the automatic captions.

For languages, caption a video in the language it's spoken in, and let the apps translate for viewers: TikTok translates captions on some videos, Instagram has its Translate closed captions switch, and Edits and YouTube Create let you choose the spoken language before they transcribe. On YouTube, a video with several audio tracks gets automatic captions in its default language. If you need the words as text first, to check them or translate them, see how to transcribe a video.

App captions are made for accessibility, and they do that job. Clippers mostly don't rely on them, for four reasons:

• Every app. A clip goes to TikTok, Reels and Shorts as one file. Captions burned into it show on all three, checked and fixed once. See how to cross-post short videos.
• Every viewer. App captions can be switched off, and on YouTube they show for viewers who turn captions on. Burned in, everyone sees them.
• Sound off. Plenty of people scroll in silence. A talking clip without captions on screen is a face moving its mouth, and they're gone before they know what it's about.
• Style. The captions on clips that do well show a few words at a time, timed to each word, with the word being said lit up. App captions are plain lines. Sizes, fonts and where to put them are in how to caption short videos.

Two free tools do it in your browser, with nothing uploaded:

• The auto caption generator turns up to 30 minutes of speech at a time into timed captions, in about 100 languages, for you to edit and download as SRT or VTT.
• Add captions to video burns them in word by word, from its own transcription or your file, in the 5 styles Clyper's clips use: a 1080 × 1920 MP4 of up to 5 minutes, with no watermark.

Captioning one clip is quick with any of these. Captioning twenty from the same podcast or stream, then checking each in three apps, is where it gets slow. Clyper captions every clip it makes as part of making it: it transcribes the whole video in its own language (50+ languages), cuts each clip on whole sentences, and burns in word-by-word captions placed clear of TikTok's, Reels' and Shorts' buttons.

You check them in the editor, where any word can be fixed and keeps its timing. Pop comes on every plan; Pro and Studio add the other 4 styles. What they look like is on the animated captions page.