AI subtitle and transcription tools (with Turkish support)

Transcribing a one-hour interview by hand takes an experienced person four or five hours. AI gets a draft in minutes, but cleanup still takes time, and in languages like Turkish it can take more than in English.

Prices as of 24 October 2026.

Two different needs

Transcripts need complete, accurate text with speakers and timestamps. Subtitles need readability: line length, timing, sync. Dumping a transcript into captions usually looks bad.

Descript

Automatic transcription in 25 languages including Turkish on every plan, 8+ speaker detection and caption translation into 61 languages. You edit video by editing text. Free: 60 media minutes a month, 720p. Hobbyist: $24 monthly, $16 annual, 10 hours, 1080p without watermark. Creator: $35 or $24, 30 hours, 4K. Business: $65 or $50, 40 hours plus dubbing. Media hours count everything you import, transcribed or not.

ElevenLabs Speech to Text

About 330 credits a minute from the shared pool: roughly 30 minutes on Free, 90 on Starter, 6 hours on Creator. Handy if you already subscribe for voice; there is no editing interface.

Pictory and video tools

Pictory includes auto captions on all plans, exportable as .srt, .vtt or txt, with a 14-day trial and plans from $25 a month billed annually. Its FAQ says 7 languages on Starter and 29 on higher plans, so confirm your language during the trial.

Free options

YouTube Studio auto-captions uploads, Turkish included, and you can edit them. CapCut is the common free option for short videos. Open-source speech recognition models run locally for free and keep sensitive recordings private.

Where Turkish transcripts struggle

Proper nouns and English tech terms, long agglutinative words split wrongly, regional accents and fast speech, crosstalk, and guessed punctuation. On a clean recording expect a readable draft and plan 30 to 60 minutes of cleanup per hour.

Recording quality matters most

A lavalier mic, a soft-furnished room, no music underneath, separate tracks per speaker (Descript's multitrack transcription uses them). For bad audio, try Studio Sound or ElevenLabs' Voice Isolator first.

Formats and privacy

.srt for YouTube and editors, .vtt for web players, burned-in captions for Shorts and Reels. Cloud tools process audio on their servers; Descript states SOC 2 Type II compliance. For medical, legal or confidential recordings, local tools are safer.

Who gets what

Podcast and interview editing: Descript. Existing ElevenLabs subscribers: Speech to Text. YouTube only: Studio's own captions. Shorts: CapCut or Descript. Sensitive audio: a local model. To translate the audio itself, see our dubbing guide.

Tool pages: Descript, ElevenLabs, Pictory.

Pages mentioned in this guide