Generate subtitles for your Kannada videos

About Kannada transcription

Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) is written in the Kannada script and spoken principally in Karnataka, in southern India. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Kannada, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Kannada has a large gap between formal and colloquial speech, and regional variation across Karnataka is wide enough that the same word can surface quite differently in Bengaluru and in the north of the state. Both transcribe; neither is corrected toward the other.

What a Kannada subtitle file looks like

Four lines as they come out of the exported SRT, in the Kannada script with the timings taken from the speech itself.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,240
ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಶುಭೋದಯ.

2
00:00:03,600 --> 00:00:06,120
ಬಂದಿದ್ದಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಧನ್ಯವಾದಗಳು.

3
00:00:06,480 --> 00:00:09,300
ನಾನು ಹೇಳುವುದು ಸ್ಪಷ್ಟವಾಗಿ ಕೇಳಿಸುತ್ತಿದೆಯೇ?

4
00:00:09,700 --> 00:00:12,040
ಮುಂದಿನ ಬಾರಿ ಭೇಟಿಯಾಗೋಣ.

Line length in Kannada

Kannada builds meaning by stacking endings onto a stem, producing few words but long ones. Lines come out dense rather than wordy.

Shorter subtitle blocks read better as a result, and splitting one across two events costs nothing — the timings come from the speech either way.

What people caption in Kannada

The Kannada material that comes through most often is news, vlogs and YouTube channels, lectures and devotional and cultural programming. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Kannada transcript

• Set the language to Kannada rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. Kannada subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Kannada subtitles in another language

The same Kannada audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Kannada itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.