Captions make your videos work with the sound off. Most people browse with muted autoplay, so a video without captions loses its message before anyone taps to unmute.
Captions also make your content accessible to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they give search engines text to read.
Storista can create captions for your videos automatically, and you can always supply your own caption file instead.
Automatic captions are included on: Business, Growth, Scale plans
On every other plan you can still upload your own caption file — see
Upload your own captions below.
How automatic captions work
When you import a video, we check two things: what language is being spoken, and whether the video already has captions burned into the picture.
If the video has speech in a supported language and no captions of its own, we transcribe it and attach a caption file. This usually finishes within a couple of minutes of the video appearing in your Media Library. You don't need to start anything — it happens on import.
We use a best-in-class transcription model, chosen for accuracy across a wide range of languages, accents and real-world audio: background noise, music, several people talking.
It's very good, but no transcription is perfect, so it's worth reading over captions on
videos that matter most to you. You can replace ours with your own file at any time.
Where captions appear
- Media Library — videos with captions show a small CC badge on the tile.
- Media details — open any video to find the Captions card, where you can see the status, download the file, replace it, or remove it.
- Preview player — captions show on the video preview on the media details page, so you can check the wording and timing against what's being said.
- Your storefront widgets — captions are available to the player in Carousel,
Spotlight, Stories and Video Grid widgets.
Supported languages
We detect the spoken language automatically. These 60 languages are supported:
Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian,
Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian,
Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian,
Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian Bokmål, Odia, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese.
Videos that switch between languages mid-sentence — Hinglish or Spanglish, for example — are handled too.
If your video is in a language that isn't on this list, the Captions card will tell you,
and you can upload your own file.
Upload your own captions
Available on every plan, and useful when you already have a caption file, want to correct a wording, or your video is in an unsupported language.
Open the video from your Media Library.
In the **Captions** card, click **Upload file** (or **Replace file** if captions are
already there).
Choose a `.vtt` or `.srt` file. If you upload `.srt` we convert it for you — most video editors export either format.
Your file replaces whatever was there, and we never overwrite it afterwards: once you've uploaded your own captions, automatic generation leaves that video alone. Remove your file with Delete if you'd like us to generate captions again.
Editing captions
To fix a typo or adjust timing:
Download the caption file from the Captions card.
Edit it in any subtitle editor, or a plain text editor.
Upload it back.
What the Captions card tells you
What you see | What it means |
No captions yet | Nothing has been generated or uploaded |
Generating captions | We're working on it. The card updates on its own when it's done. |
Captions ready | The caption file is attached. Download, replace or remove it here. |
Your uploaded caption file | These captions came from a file you supplied. |
This video already has captions burned into it | The words are part of the picture, so a second set on top would overlap. Use Generate anyway if you'd like a caption file regardless — a separate file can be turned off by the viewer and read by search engines, which burned-in text can't. |
No speech detected | We couldn't hear anyone talking — a music-only or silent video. |
This video is too long | Automatic captions cover videos up to 30 minutes. Upload your own file for longer videos. |
Caption generation failed | Something went wrong. Click **Try again**. If it keeps failing, get in touch. |
Common questions
Do captions cost extra?
No. On plans that include automatic captions, they're generated for your videos at no
additional charge.
Can I turn automatic captions off?
They only run on videos you import from now on, and generating them changes nothing about how your video looks. If you'd rather a specific video had no captions, open it and click Delete in the Captions card.
Will captions cover my video?
No. They're a separate track the player shows along the bottom, and viewers can switch them off. That's different from captions burned into the picture, which can't be removed.
Why do my captions have a mistake in it?
Product names, brand names and unusual spellings are the hardest things for any
transcription to get right. Download the file, correct it, and upload it back — your
version is kept.
What about videos I imported before this feature existed?
Automatic captions apply to videos imported from the time the feature is switched on for your account. For anything already in your library, open the video and click Generate in the Captions card.
Can I have captions in more than one language?
Not yet — one caption file per video for now, in the language that's spoken. Translated captions are something we're looking at.