A new accessibility feature transcribes uncaptioned videos on the fly — clips you record, videos friends send, and content streamed online — using on-device speech recognition. English in the US and Canada at launch.
2026-09-11 · by Moe Ameen
Published 2026-09-11 · Updated
Short answer
Generated Subtitles is an iOS 27 accessibility feature that captions any video lacking its own captions, using on-device speech recognition. Apple previewed it on May 19, 2026, and iOS 27 shipped September 14. It covers videos you record, videos people send you and streamed video, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Vision Pro. At launch it's English-only in the US and Canada, and the captions never travel with the file.
Key takeaways
Apple previewed Generated Subtitles on May 19, 2026, as part of a batch of accessibility features ahead of WWDC, and the capability ships this fall inside iOS 27 and its sibling operating systems. The idea is simple: when a video does not already carry a caption track, the device transcribes the spoken audio and displays subtitles automatically during playback, with no action required from the viewer. Apple's own framing is that "videos can display transcriptions of spoken audio automatically when captions or subtitles are not already provided."
Crucially, the transcription runs on-device. Apple says the subtitles are generated privately with an on-device speech recognition model, so the video's audio is not uploaded to the cloud to be captioned. The feature is systemwide rather than tied to one app — it covers videos you record on your iPhone, videos you receive from friends and family, and videos streamed online, so it can add captions to a clip in Photos, Messages, a social feed, or a streaming player.
Apple lists support across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, i.e. iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, tvOS 27, and visionOS 27. Viewers can adjust how the subtitles look from the video playback menu or in Settings, and turn the feature off.
At launch, Generated Subtitles is limited to English and available only in the United States and Canada. At its September 9, 2026 event, Apple set the iOS 27 release for September 14, 2026. Treat the exact device requirements and rollout timing as a launch-window snapshot and confirm specifics on Apple's own pages.
Generated Subtitles helps you watch video; it does not help you ship it. The captions are rendered on the viewer's device at playback time and are gated to English in the US and Canada, so they never leave with the file. Post that same clip to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, or LinkedIn and a viewer in another country, on Android, or on an older OS sees no captions at all. For a creator, the caption has to be burned into the video so every viewer sees it regardless of their device — and it has to be styled and sized for each platform's safe zones. That is the half iOS 27 doesn't touch, and it is exactly what Kompozy does.
Bring a raw recording into Kompozy and it transcribes the audio, cuts the long take into vertical Clipped Shorts, and burns in word-synced captions styled to your brand and sized per platform — not drawn on one viewer's screen but rendered into the pixels of every export. From the same source it also fans out carousels, quote graphics, a blog, and a newsletter, all held to one Persona Brief, then schedules and publishes the set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. Use iOS 27 to sanity-check your footage sound-off; use Kompozy to make the captions permanent and get the video in front of an audience.
A real persona short with burned-in captions generated in the Kompozy workspace, shown as an example of the format. It wasn't made about this story. The captions are in the pixels, so every viewer sees them.
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A systemwide accessibility feature that automatically transcribes the spoken audio of any video that lacks its own captions and shows subtitles during playback. It uses an on-device speech recognition model, so the audio is not uploaded to the cloud.
Apple says it covers videos you record on your iPhone, videos you receive from friends and family, and videos streamed online, across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro. You can adjust the caption appearance or turn it off in the playback menu or Settings.
At launch, Generated Subtitles is limited to English and available only in the United States and Canada. Apple has not announced a schedule for other languages or regions.
No. Generated Subtitles are drawn on the viewer's device at playback and are not written into the file, so they do not travel when you export or publish. To caption a video for every viewer, you need to burn captions into it — a content engine like Kompozy does that and sizes them per platform.
We checked every date, figure and quote on this page against the sources listed below on 2026-10-23, including Apple's own May 19 announcement, and rewrote or removed anything they didn't support. Kompozy plan and feature details come from kompozy.io/pricing.
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