HOW TO TURN ON (AND OFF) AUTO-CAPTIONS FOR TIKTOK VIDEOS

Adding captions to videos can be very helpful, especially for viewers who are hard of hearing or deaf. They can also be useful for people in an environment where there is no sound or headphones. 

Before the Short Video Platform added automatic captioning to the app in April this year, many of its creators manually added subtitles to their TikTok videos, either through the in-app subtitle feature or through third-party apps. 

But this is no longer necessary. The auto-captioning feature is now part of TikTok, thanks to organisations like Deaf Collective who developed the feature in partnership with TikTok.

As a creator, I highly recommend that you enable automatic captioning for all your videos. Do not worry. If someone watching your video doesn’t like captions, he or she can easily turn them off (more on that later).

HOW TO TURN ON CAPTIONS

• After creating or uploading a video, check the box to indicate that you can start editing. You are now on the first page for editing.

• Find the “Captions” icon on the right side of the screen and tap it.

• When you enable captions for the first time, you will be presented with a screen that explains how they work and asks for your consent to the “collection and use of the audio.”

• TikTok may take a while to process your captions or subtitles depending on the length of the video and your phone’s performance. Note that auto-captions do not work for songs added to videos. It’s just for speech.

• After TikTok has processed the audio, you will be taken to a screen with a smaller version of the video with the captions listed below.

• If you like the captions, click the “Save” button in the upper right corner. If you are not comfortable with a spelling mistake or a wrong word, you can correct it. Tap the edit icon (looks like a pencil and paper) to the right of the word “Captions”. Then you can use your phone’s keyboard to change the text problem.

• Lines that you think are too long can be split, but lines that you think are too short cannot be shortened. If you accidentally break the line and change your mind, you need to press the “Back” button on your phone, undo the change and try again.

• When done, click “Save.”

Unfortunately, you can’t format your text – you get what you get. Text is usually displayed in white letters in a darker rectangle. If you want to get fancy with your captions, you will have to turn off the “auto-caption” feature (using the same Caption icon) and use the Text feature (at the bottom of the editing screen) to manually create different text-colours for captions, size and font.

IF YOU WANT TO DISABLE CAPTIONS WHILE WATCHING VIDEOS … 

I personally love to read captions while watching videos, but some people find them awkward. If you don’t want captions on your TikTok videos, you can disable or turn them off. (Of course, you don’t actually get rid of it, just hide it on your device.)

• While watching a video with captions, tap “Captions” and then tap “Hide Captions”. 

• Auto-captions are never turned off for every video you watch. There is usually a small rectangle on the side of each video to indicate the presence of captions. 

• Tap the rectangle to turn captions back on.