Captions written on your Mac, ready to edit.
Press Generate Captions and Lumae transcribes your narration, or the clips' own sound, with Apple's on-device speech models. It breaks the words into short lines at sentence ends and pauses, and every line stays editable.
How it works
- 01
Say something on the record
Narrate while you record, add narration afterwards, or import a clip with speech in it.
- 02
Generate Captions
Open the Captions tab and press Generate Captions, or ⌥⌘C. It runs on this Mac. The first time, macOS may download Apple's speech model for your language.
- 03
Fix and style them
Click any line in the Transcript to correct it, then set Position, Background and Size. The export draws them into the video.
What you can change
Each one is named the way it appears in Lumae.
- Generate Captions
- Transcribes the narration if there is any, otherwise the clips' own sound. Never the music.
- Position
- Bottom or Top.
- Background
- A dark plate behind the words, on by default.
- Size
- From 2 % to 8 % of the frame's height, 4.2 % by default.
- Transcript
- Every line with its time. Click one to edit it, or press + to write one at the playhead (⌥⌘T).
- Show Captions
- Hides or shows them without deleting anything, from the Captions menu.
The numbers
- Characters on a generated line before a new caption starts
- 46
- The longest a generated caption stays on screen
- 3.5 s
- A pause longer than this starts a new caption, as a sentence end does
- 0.7 s
- The shortest time a generated caption stays up
- 0.8 s
- Default text size, as a share of the frame's height
- 4.2 %
- The widest a caption gets, as a share of the frame, before it wraps
- 82 %
Questions
Anything else, ask on the feedback page.
Does my audio leave my Mac?
No. Transcription runs on-device with Apple's speech models. The first time, macOS may download the model for your language.
Which languages does it support?
Your Mac's current language, as long as Apple offers on-device speech for it. If it doesn't, Lumae tells you so.
Can I export a subtitle file?
No. Captions are drawn into the exported video.
Will generating again wipe my edits?
Yes. Generate Captions replaces the whole set, hand-written lines included. ⌘Z brings the old set back.
Next
All features
Record your next demo. Annotate your next screenshot.
Lumae is free for Mac. It zooms on your clicks, smooths your cursor and writes your captions, so your time goes into the demo, not the edit.
See what changed in the latest release