If you want to add captions to a Loom video, you are making one of the highest-impact edits possible. Studies consistently show that roughly 85% of social and feed video is watched on mute, so without on-screen text most viewers never hear a word you recorded. Captions also make your content accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, help non-native speakers follow along, and boost comprehension and watch time for everyone. As a bonus, the transcript behind your Loom subtitles gives search engines real text to index, which helps your videos surface in results. The good news: there are several free and paid ways to add captions, and at least one of them is fully automatic.
Below we cover Loom’s built-in captions, the manual SRT/VTT route, and the fastest option — ScreenStory’s automatic word-level karaoke captions that sync perfectly to an AI voiceover.
Loom automatically generates a transcript and closed captions for recordings on many of its plans. When the transcript is ready, viewers can toggle the CC button in the player to show captions, and you can open the transcript panel to read or copy the full text.
To enable or check captions on a Loom video:
The limitations matter. Loom’s captions are display-only: they live in the player, so anyone watching outside Loom (in a presentation, on social media, or in a downloaded file) sees nothing. Styling is minimal, you cannot brand the captions, accuracy varies with audio quality and accents, and there is no word-level highlighting. If you need captions that travel with the file, you will need another method.
The traditional approach is to create a subtitle file — an SRT or VTT — and attach or burn it in with a video editor. This works, but it takes effort.
This route is free, but it is fiddly: you are juggling files, fixing timing drift, and styling captions by hand. For a single short clip it is fine. For regular content it becomes a chore — which is why automatic word-level captions exist.
ScreenStory removes the manual work entirely. It imports your Loom recording, rewrites the script for clarity, generates a natural AI voiceover, and produces word-level karaoke captions that highlight each word exactly as it is spoken — perfectly synced because the captions are built from the same narration. You then export a polished MP4 with the captions burned in. Here is the workflow:
Because the captions are generated from the AI narration rather than guessed from messy original audio, accuracy is excellent and the karaoke highlighting lands on the right word every time. It is the recommended option if you want professional captions without touching a subtitle file — and it is part of turning a raw clip into something you can ship, as covered in making a Loom video professional.
There are two kinds of captions, and the difference decides where your text shows up.
For social media, presentations, and watch-on-mute scenarios, burned-in captions win because they always appear. Styling matters too: font, size, color, and position can be tuned to match your brand and stay readable over busy screen recordings. Word-level highlighting (karaoke style) adds a modern, engaging feel that flat subtitle blocks lack.
| Method | Auto-generated? | Word-level sync? | Burned-in? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loom native CC | Yes | No | No (player only) | Quick in-Loom viewing |
| Manual SRT/VTT | Partly | No | Optional | One-off clips, YouTube |
| ScreenStory | Yes | Yes | Yes | Polished, shareable video |
If you are still weighing tools, our roundup of the best Loom alternatives compares the full feature set, and the pricing page shows ScreenStory plans starting at $9.99/mo with a free trial.
Yes. Loom auto-generates a transcript and closed captions for recordings on many of its plans, viewable via the CC button. However, those captions are display-only inside Loom’s player and are not burned into the file, so they disappear when the video is downloaded or shared elsewhere.
The free manual route is to download the video, auto-transcribe it into an SRT file, and upload that SRT to a platform like YouTube that accepts subtitle files. It works but requires fixing timing and styling by hand. ScreenStory offers a free trial if you want automatic captions without the manual steps.
Loom itself does not burn captions into the file. To get permanent, burned-in (open) captions, either import an SRT into a video editor and re-render, or paste your public Loom link into ScreenStory and export an MP4 with word-level captions baked in.
Yes. ScreenStory supports 15+ languages, so you can generate a voiceover and matching captions in the language your audience speaks. This is especially useful for reaching non-native viewers or localizing the same recording for multiple markets.
Word-level (karaoke) captions highlight each word as it is spoken, which improves focus, comprehension, and engagement compared with static blocks of text. Because ScreenStory builds them from the same AI narration, the timing is exact rather than estimated.
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