Filipino Captions for Shorts

The Shorts feed is a muted, autoplaying, thumb-driven surface. A Filipino-speaking viewer lands mid-sentence and gives the video about a second. Sound is off by default and often stays off for the whole session, so on-screen text is the primary channel, not a secondary one — the hook has to be readable before it is audible.

YouTube's auto-generated captions for Shorts are a subtitle track: hidden behind a button, rendered in YouTube's style, and unreliable for many languages. Captions burned into the frame are in your font and colour, sit where you put them, and are there whether or not anyone taps CC — and they survive when the clip is downloaded and reposted to Reels or TikTok.

They also carry the middle. Retention on a Short falls off in the first few seconds, and Filipino text moving in time with the speech gives the eye something to track — a reason to stay through the setup and reach the payoff.

Filipino short-form video is fast, conversational Taglish, so Filipino captions here run three or four words a card with word-level timing and each word written in the language it was said, so the constant switching reads as natural rather than as errors.

The transcription is the same one behind the Filipino subtitle generator: the model transcribes the Filipino audio, writes each word in the language it was said, handles the affixes and reduplication of Tagalog grammar, and times each line to the frame. For Shorts, the result is then split into three- or four-word cards and rendered with a font that has the full Latin character set, so nothing falls back to a box or a smudge at phone size.