Captions

Slyve turns what you said into captions. It all happens on your Mac.

Make captions

1. Open the Captions tab (⌘4).
2. Click Generate transcript.
3. Slyve writes the transcript and times each word.

English captions come with every Mac. They keep each “um” and “uh” so you can cut them later. For other languages and noisy rooms, get the optional Accurate captions add-on and pick the Language. See Add-ons.

Spell names and jargon right

Type product names, people’s names and jargon into Vocabulary, under the language, separated by commas (for example Slyve, Kubernetes, Nakamura). The next transcript spells them as you wrote them: Accurate captions and Apple Speech are told the words before they listen, and English captions fix close misspellings of them afterwards (for example “kubernetis” becomes “Kubernetes”). Short words of four letters or fewer are only matched exactly. The list is kept for every project; click Transcribe again to use it on a transcript you already have.

Choose a look

Pick a caption look:

• Pill: the line on a dark rounded plate (the default).
• Plain: the words alone, with a soft shadow under them and no plate. Pick it when a plate would hide too much of the picture, or for a quiet look over a busy screen.
• Karaoke: a plate, with the word being spoken lit behind it.
• Outline: white words with a dark outline and no plate.
• Highlight: the word being spoken gets a warm highlight.
• Pop: the word being spoken gets a bolder, animated accent.
• Subtle: the words come in one by one, without a plate.
• Tile: each word on an opaque white tile, in a dark serif face.

Karaoke, Highlight, Pop and Subtle follow each word as it is spoken, in the preview and in the exported video.

Under More in the Captions card, choose the Font and Colour independently of the look. Use Brand colours and font applies your saved Brand choices. Position places captions at the top, middle or bottom of the safe area; all three positions stay inside the export frame.

Pacing shows a full line or one timed word at a time. Entrance chooses Appear, Fade, Slide or Lateral. Slide keeps the familiar caption motion. Lateral brings each line in from the side over 250 ms. Fade takes 250 ms; macOS Reduce Motion makes captions appear without entrance motion. The preview and export use the same timing, including after cuts and speed changes.

If a caption’s words are too dense for their time on screen, the card shows a reading-speed warning. Shorten the text or give it more time, then preview the result in each canvas shape you plan to export.

Show or hide them

The switch Show captions in the video burns the captions into the picture. Turn it off and they stay in the project, ready to export as a subtitle file (SRT or WebVTT).

Fix a word

Click a caption on the Captions lane to change its words. To cut words out of the video, see Edit by transcript.