How to Add Captions to a Screen Recording (Automatic & Private)

Captions started as an accessibility requirement and became a retention feature. Viewers who can't turn sound on still follow the walkthrough, viewers who can hear still read along, and search systems can index what the video actually says.

For customer-facing video — onboarding, demos, tutorials — captions also signal care. A polished recording with clean subtitles reads as documentation; a silent wall of UI reads as an afterthought.

Manual captioning means typing what you said and timing each line — accurate, but roughly four to six minutes of work per minute of video. Nobody does this twice.

Cloud AI captioning (Loom, YouTube, most SaaS recorders) is fast, but your footage and audio are uploaded to someone's servers, the good models usually sit behind a paid tier, and nothing works offline.

On-device AI captioning runs a speech-recognition model like Whisper locally. You get the speed of AI transcription with none of the upload — which matters when recordings contain unreleased features, customer data, or internal tooling.

Here is the on-device workflow in Clapio. It works the same on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and it works offline.

Burned-in captions are part of the pixels — they show everywhere the video plays, including chat previews and GIF-style embeds, but viewers can't turn them off and there is exactly one language.

Sidecar SRT or VTT files keep captions as data: platforms like YouTube let viewers toggle them and pick languages, and you can ship several translations with one video file. The practical rule: burn in for Slack, social, and docs; ship SRT/VTT for YouTube, LMS platforms, and help centers — or do both from the same recording.