AI-Powered Subtitles with React and Visual Editing

If you've ever integrated video or audio content into a web app, you know that handling subtitles can be a pain. Between transcription services, timing files, and making edits, it often feels like you need specialized tools just to manage captions. What if you could handle it all directly in your React components?

That's exactly what Flycut Caption aims to solve. This React component brings AI-powered speech recognition and visual subtitle editing right into your development workflow.

What It Does

Flycut Caption is a React component that automatically generates subtitles from audio using AI speech recognition. But it doesn't stop there—it also provides a visual editor where you can fine-tune the timing and text of your captions directly in the browser.

The component takes an audio or video source, processes it through speech-to-text, and returns both the transcribed text and precise timing data. You get a complete subtitle management system that fits into your existing React application.

Why It's Cool

The magic here is in the combination of automated AI transcription with manual refinement capabilities. Instead of choosing between fully automated (and often inaccurate) captions or manually creating them from scratch, you get the best of both worlds.

The visual timeline editor is particularly clever—you can drag and adjust subtitle boundaries, edit text in place, and see exactly how your captions will sync with your media. This is way more intuitive than working with raw SRT or VTT files.

Under the hood, it uses Web Speech API or can integrate with external speech recognition services, giving you flexibility in how you handle the transcription. The component is built with customization in mind, so you can style it to match your application's design system.

How to Try It

Getting started is straightforward. First, install the package:

npm install flycut-caption

Then, drop it into your React component:

import { FlycutCaption } from 'flycut-caption'

function MyVideoPlayer() {
  return (
    <FlycutCaption
      src="/path/to/your/video.mp4"
      onSubtitlesChange={(subtitles) => {
        // Do something with the final subtitles
        console.log(subtitles)
      }}
    />
  )
}

The component will handle the speech recognition and provide you with the editor interface. Once you're happy with the subtitles, the onSubtitlesChange callback gives you the final subtitle data in various formats.

Check out the GitHub repository for more detailed examples and configuration options.

Final Thoughts

As someone who's wrestled with subtitle files before, I appreciate how Flycut Caption removes the friction from what's typically a tedious process. It's particularly useful for content creators building their own platforms, educational applications, or any project where you need precise control over video captions.

The component feels like it was built by developers who actually needed to solve this problem—the API is sensible, and the visual editing makes what was previously a technical chore into something straightforward. It's one of those tools that does exactly what it says, without overcomplicating things.

@githubprojects