TLDR

Quick Subtitles is a new app that I built that runs on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS 26. It uses the new speech analyzer features in those operating systems to locally process audio and video files so that you can generate high-quality transcripts and export subtitles for those files.

The app is free to download and to create a few transcripts. It costs $19.99 as a one-time unlock to get unlimited transcriptions as well as a batch processing feature.

Download it for iPhone and iPad (Mac version coming as soon as App Review allows it though, which has been a battle).

The longer version

This was the first project I started after WWDC this year, and it's the first time I've ever built an app using one of Apple's new technologies in an operating system. I built this in part because it's something that I use constantly. I generate podcasts and video files on a weekly basis, and those need subtitles. I've been doing this in MacWhisper for a couple years now, and it works pretty great there, but I wanted to have a tool that was custom-tailored to my needs. That meant minimal functionality and everything optimized around ease of use and performance. QuickSubtitles is not going to win any design awards, but it's very efficient at doing what it needs to do.

My idea for this app is basically that you're a creator who just created an audio file or a video file, and you need to get a transcript for it to create subtitles, to write show notes, to provide it to somebody as a document. Whatever the case may be, I want to make it so you can just launch Quick Subtitles, drop your file in it, and get what you need within seconds.

And yes, I do mean seconds. The performance of Apple's SpeechAnalyzer is really impressive and quite accurate in my experience. I've been using it all summer to transcribe our episodes of Comfort Zone, which is usually about 70 to 80 minutes of audio, and Quick Subtitles generates a full transcript of that project in one minute...

...on my iPhone.

Yeah, the performance is pretty wild, and it's allowed me to create transcripts on whatever device I happen to be working on. I happen to know that my podcast co-host, Chris Lawley, has been using it to generate transcripts on his iPad, something he wasn't able to do in a good way before this. It was one of the things he went to the Mac to do because the Mac options were just better than what was on the iPad.

One of the reasons I wanted to use Apple's SpeechAnalyzer over a Whisper model in some other app was because there are no additional downloads required. To use these third-party models, you need to download a several gigabyte file to your device, which may not be a huge issue for some, but it is for other people, and definitely is if you're on a weak network connection and don't have it downloaded already. By using Apple's on-device model, Quick Subtitles is ready to go the moment you install it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are quite a few apps like this that get released this week because this was an obvious type of app to develop for the new operating systems that just came out. But I hope you give mine a try, and I hope you know that I will continue to be the primary user of this app. And if there are issues or compatibility things that come up in the coming years, I'll be fixing them right away because this is a core part of my workflow.

Anyway, I won't go on any longer than this, you understand the gist, and you should just try it yourself to see if you like it. Once again, it's available on the App Store for free with a one-time in-app purchase to unlock everything, and I hope you like it.