Free Video Caption Generator - Add Animated Subtitles & Captions to Videos with AI

Yes — completely free for up to 1 hour of video content. You can auto-caption your videos and download fully captioned MP4s without paying a cent. Choppity's full platform (which unlocks longer videos, auto-clipping, brand kits, scheduling, and team features) is a paid upgrade, but this caption tool itself is permanently free up to the 1-hour limit.

Technically: captions assume the viewer can't hear (so they include "[laughter]", "[music playing]", and speaker IDs), while subtitles assume the viewer can hear but doesn't speak the language. In practice, the terms are used interchangeably online. Our generator can output either — toggle accessibility cues on or off depending on your audience.

Burned in. Choppity bakes the captions directly into your finished MP4 so they're visible by default on every platform — no SRT upload step, no platform-specific CC settings to configure, no risk of captions getting stripped on re-share. This also means your captions are styled exactly the way you designed them, every time, on every device.

Absolutely. Paste a URL or upload your 9:16 video and the AI generates captions sized for vertical short-form. Pick a viral style preset (word-by-word, karaoke, Hormozi-style) and download a fully captioned MP4 ready to post.

Upload MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI, M4V, or paste URLs from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Loom, or Twitter/X. The free tier handles videos up to 4GB. The output works on every social platform and every video editor.

95%+ on clear audio — better than YouTube's auto-captions and on par with paid transcription services like Rev or Otter. Multiple speakers, accents, technical jargon, and proper punctuation all work out of the box. You can also edit any caption manually before exporting.

Over 40, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The AI auto-detects the spoken language, or you can set it manually.

Yes — because the captions are burned directly into your MP4, they appear by default on every platform: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and long-form, Facebook Reels, LinkedIn video, and X. Viewers don't need to enable closed captions and you don't need to manage separate CC files per platform.

Yes. Our captions are time-synced, properly punctuated, and include optional speaker labels — meeting the visual requirements of WCAG 2.1 Level AA for prerecorded captions. Because they're burned into the video they're always visible, which is often a stricter accessibility outcome than a CC toggle that viewers have to enable themselves.

Most videos under 30 minutes are processed in 2-5 minutes. A 60-minute podcast typically takes 6-10 minutes. Processing happens in the cloud — close the tab and come back, your captions will be waiting.

You can preview the AI captions instantly without creating an account. To download the finished captioned MP4 (or post it directly to socials from inside Choppity), a free account is required — no credit card needed. The free tier covers up to 1 hour of video content with no watermarks.

Kapwing and Veed have tight caps on free usage and a watermark on free exports. Rev is paid-only ($1.50/min for AI, more for human). Descript is a full editor at $15+/month. Choppity gives you a full hour of video on the free plan with no watermark and the same 95%+ accuracy — plus unlike the others, the full Choppity platform also auto-clips your long videos into short-form, so captioning is one step in a much bigger workflow.